Page 25 of Justice

“Baby killer.”

That never changed. Not the pain, not the blood soaking hot into the front of me, not the gray tipping to black. Those two words, purred into my ear like a lullaby. Baby killer. As if she knew me. As if she knew one single thing about what happened to my child.

NOW

I came up out of the bed with a scream lodged sideways in my throat, my hand already flat against my chest, pressing the scar like I could hold my insides in. My body slick and shaking.

Free. I was free. I made myself breathe it. Big house, soft bed, a window with the moon in it. Free.

And that was when I heard it.

The soft, definite click of my bedroom door pulling shut.

I went still as death. Every hair on my body stood up at once, and the old animal that had kept me alive in that gray place came fully awake behind my eyes, because I knew that sound. I knew a door closing when I heard one. And I had shut that door myself before I lay down.

So how was it closed yet again?

I was up and across the room before I’d finished deciding to be, bare feet silent on the floor, heart slamming. I pulled the door open and looked down the long dark hall. I listened with my body.

Nothing. The house breathed around me. There wasn’t a sound to be heard.

I checked them all. I couldn’t have stopped myself if I tried. Rita first, always Rita, her door cracked open the inch she liked, the old woman deep under her covers with her mouth open, snoring soft and steady. Safe. Then Dream, sprawled sideways across her bed like only a child sleeps, one foot hanging off, a stuffed rabbit strangled in the crook of her arm. Safe.

Then Storie.

I eased that door open a careful inch, and there she was, a still shape under the blankets, turned toward the wall. She was fast asleep. Or doing a very good impression of it. I stood in her doorway one second too long, watching the rise and fall of her.

I pulled the door to and stood in the hall with my pulse in my ears.

I went to the end of the hall, to the big double doors that were always shut, and I did the thing I had no business doing. I pushed one open and looked.

The room was empty. The bed was made, untouched, the pillows sitting perfectly. No one had crawled in it tonight. No shoes by the door. No watch on the nightstand.

Justice wasn’t here.

Justice wasn’t home at all.

And I stood there in the dark doorway of a bedroom that wasn’t mine, in a house full of sleeping people I was lying to, one hand still pressed to a scar nobody in this world knew I carried. And I felt the two things move through me at the exact same time, like they always did now.

The first was fear. Somebody had opened my door in the dark and let it close. Every soul in this house was accounted for and asleep. Which meant either my own mind was starting to turn on me, or one of these sleeping angels wasn’t half as asleep as they looked.

The second thing, God forgive me, was worse. Because underneath the fear, quiet, shameful and undeniable, was the wondering. Wondering where he was. Wondering who he was with. Wondering why the empty side of that big made bed put an ache in me I had no right to feel. Why am I jealous?

I pulled his door shut, soft, and went back down the hall to a room where I would not sleep another minute that night.

I checked my own lock twice.

It didn’t help. It never did.

14

JUSTICE

It was a little after three when I sat on the edge of the hotel bed and started pulling my clothes back on, and Kira watched me do it from the sheets like she already knew what was coming.

“I want to chill on this for a while,” I said.

The room went quiet. She sat up, holding the sheet to her chest.