Page 24 of Justice

Solomon Sheffield.

And there he was. A fresh headline, hours old. He’d given an interview from inside. There was a photo, my Solo, older now, grayer, thinner in the face than the man who’d wrapped his big hands around mine across a steel table and thanked God for me. And under the photo, in his own words, the thing that reached down my throat and closed a cold fist around my heart.

“My lawyer was incompetent. I sat in this cell for years because the woman defending me dropped the ball. She had my life in her hands and she didn’t do right. If I’d had real representation, I’d have been home to my kids a long time ago.”

I read it, and the kitchen tilted.

Because he was wrong, and he had no idea how wrong, and I could never in this life tell him. I hadn’t dropped the ball.

But Solo hated me now. I could see it in his eyes. And if I were him, I’d hate me too.

“What are you looking at?”

I hadn’t heard her move. That was the thing about Storie, she moved through a house like a cat, and now she was standing close behind my shoulder, close enough to read my screen, those flat pretty eyes already on it before I could think.

I exited out fast, smooth, everything I had left in me poured into making the motion look like nothing at all.

“Just the news.” I turned and gave her an easy face, the face I could put on in my sleep. “Nothing interesting. You should go get started on your homework, baby.”

She looked at me a beat too long. She hadn’t been trying to be friendly, coming up on me like that. She’d been trying to see. There was a difference, and I knew it in my bones, because I’d spent a marriage learning the difference between a person who wanted to know you and a person who wanted to catch you.

“I want to make dinner for my dad tonight,” she said. “I’ll do my homework after.”

It caught me off guard. In two weeks I’d never once seen this child lift a finger for anybody in this house.

“Oh. Well, I was going to cook⁠—”

“I want to do it.” Her face did something quick, there and gone, too fast to name. “I owe it to him.”

The words sat wrong. Couldn’t tell you why. A daughter wanting to cook for her father was a sweet thing, a normal thing, something that should have warmed up the kitchen. But it came out of Storie flat and certain, like a line she’d practiced, like a debt she was settling.

I owe it to him. A strange thing for a child to say.

“Fine,” I said, keeping it light, keeping my face soft and open. “Kitchen’s yours, chef.”

She held my eyes one more second, then turned and started pulling things from the refrigerator like she’d had the menu picked out before she ever walked in the door. I went back to wiping a counter that was already clean, watching that girl move around the kitchen with a purpose I couldn’t read, and I told myself I was being paranoid. I told myself a teenage girl deciding to be nice for once was not a thing that required watching.

But even knowing that, I had to watch her anyway.

13

SKYE

BEFORE

In the dream it was always cold.

That was the first thing, the cold that lived in the walls, in the painted cinder block that sweated in summer and froze in winter, in the thin mattress that never once got warm no matter how small I made myself on it. Everything in that place was the color of nothing. Gray floors, gray doors, a gray light that came from everywhere and belonged to no sun. And the sounds. Lord, the sounds never stopped. Metal on metal. Doors that only opened and shut when somebody else decided. A woman crying three cells down, every single night, for a man who was never coming.

In the dream I was walking like you learn to walk in a place like that, small, quiet, eyes down, hugging the wall, making yourself less. You learn it fast or you learn it hard. I’d learned it both ways.

And then hands.

Hands in my hair, yanking my head back. An arm across my throat. The gray world tipping sideways as they dragged me into a corner the cameras couldn’t reach. There was always a corner the cameras couldn’t reach, and everybody who lived in that place knew exactly where it was. I fought. I always fought. In the dream and in the memory both, I clawed. I kicked. I made myself as much of a problem as a woman my size could make. It was never, ever enough.

Something hot and bright opened across my chest. A line of fire from one side to the other, drawn slow, drawn deliberate, a signature carved into me by a hand that wanted me to carry it forever.

And the voice. The voice pressed right up against my ear, hot and wet and almost tender, like you’d tell somebody a secret.