Page 20 of Justice

“This work for you?” he asked.

“It’s more than I need.”

“If you need anything else let me know.” I made myself stop counting the ways a person could and couldn’t get to me in my sleep.

He’d ordered rotisserie chicken, green beans, mashed potatoes, corn bread and a chocolate cake from a restaurant.

Rita sat across from the girls. Dream narrated her entire day in exhausting, delightful detail. Justice sat at the head of it all, quiet and watchful. More than once I caught him looking at me down the length of that table, then pretending he hadn’t been. I kept my eyes on my plate and my heart behind its wall and told myself I was being paid to be here, not to feel anything about the man paying me.

And then there was Storie.

The girl ate in near silence, like she did everything, those flat pretty eyes moving around the table taking inventory. She hadn’t said ten words to me since I’d moved in, and I’d stopped trying to earn them. But somewhere between the green beans and the second helping, she set her fork down, and she spoke into a lull like she’d been waiting for one.

“Did you know,” Storie said, to no one, to all of us, “that once they say you didn’t do it, that’s it? They can’t ever charge you again. Even if you went on TV after and said you did. There’s nothing they can do. It’s, like, a free pass.”

The table went a little quiet. Dream kept eating. Rita’s eyes came up.

And I opened my mouth before the careful woman in me could clamp it shut, because the wrong-in-the-room thing had always pulled the correction out of me the same way a struck knee kicks.

“That’s not quite how it works,” I heard myself say, even and easy. “It’s called double jeopardy, and it only protects you after there’s a verdict. It doesn’t cover perjury, so you lie under oath, that’s a fresh charge. It doesn’t stop a civil suit, and it doesn’t stop the federal government from picking the same case right back up under a different law. People think it’s a clean way out.” I reached for my water, felt the room, and softened it down to nothing. “It almost never is.”

The quiet held one beat too long.

Storie looked at me then, really looked, for the first time since I’d walked into her family. And it wasn’t a teenager’s look. What sat behind those eyes was cold, patient, old. She was taking inventory, like she’d just learned something about me she planned to keep.

Justice’s voice came in smooth over the top of it.

“You sound like a lawyer, Miss Skye.”

Shit. I have to learn to not speak this way in front of him. He didn’t look suspicious but if I kept this up he would. He trusted that Aubrey ran a good enough background check. And if he ran one, my past shouldn’t come up. I’ve paid a lot of money for anonymity but anything could happen.

“I watch too much court TV,” I said. “Bad habit.”

He let it go. The conversation moved on, Dream launched into something about a pony, and I sat there with my pulse in my ears and my eyes on my plate.

But I was watching Storie now. Watching her like I watched a room I didn’t trust. Because a fifteen-year-old girl doesn’t bring a thing like that to a dinner table for no reason. She doesn’t research how a person gets away with something, memorize it, and lay it out cold in front of company. She’d said it on purpose. She’d watched my face while she said it. And under all that flat, pretty stillness, I saw the thing I’d spent my life learning to see in people.

Something in that child was not right. She was watching all of us. Waiting on something.

I’d know it anywhere. I’d been married to it.

“So this weekend.” Justice set his fork down. “Dream’s birthday. Saturday. I know Saturdays are yours, and I’m not asking you to give it up for free. But it’s gonna be a whole thing, family, kids, more people than I know what to do with, and it would help to have you there. You’d be compensated for the day.”

“Pony day!” Dream shrieked.

“We’ll see about the pony,” Justice said, and Dream vibrated in her chair.

“I’ll try to make it,” I told him. And I meant try like I meant everything, holding a door open behind me. A party meant more people. More faces. More chances for one of them to be one I knew. But Dream was looking at me with her shining face, and Lord, I could not tell that child no.

“Okay then,” Justice said, and the set of his shoulders eased, and I pretended not to see that either.

The sundowning came for Rita after the dishes were done.

It came like it always did, quiet first, then all at once. She was fine on the couch, and then she wasn’t, rising up out of her seat with her hands working at the hem of her cardigan, her eyes gone somewhere far back.

“I have to go,” she said, urgent, to the room. “The delivery’s coming. If I’m not there to sign for the ice, they’ll leave it on the dock and it’ll melt clean through before Curtis gets in, and then what are we pouring drinks over? Where are my keys? Somebody seen my keys?”

Justice was up fast, and I saw the fear flash across his face before he could hide it, that helpless dread of a strong man who cannot fix the one thing he’d give everything to fix. Dream had gone still and scared. Storie watched from the stairs with no expression at all.