Page 5 of Justice

“I sent them.” She said it like she was accepting an award. “I know that family. I know what they can’t stand and what they’re scared of, same as you sniffed it out in ten minutes. So I paid a few people to go in and bomb their interviews. By the time you came floating, you looked like a saint.” She spread her hands. “Sis. You’re welcome.”

I couldn’t help but laugh.

“You are a menace,” I told her.

“I’m a businesswoman.” She stood up, scooped a folder off the corner of the desk, already three moves ahead. “Now take your blessed self on out my office so I can call these people before they come to their senses. Come on, I’ll walk you out, Mel.”

The name hit the floor like a dropped plate.

I was up out the chair before I decided to be, and whatever came across my face wiped hers clean.

“Don’t.” It came out flat and quiet, nothing at all like the sound I’d just been laughing with. “You cannot do that. Not in here, not on a phone, not even in your sleep. That name is dead and buried. You gotta put it back in the ground every single time it tries to come back up, or you keep your mouth shut. Those are the only two options.”

“Skye.” She set the folder down slow, both hands coming up. “Baby, I’m sorry. It slipped. There’s nobody in here but me and you.”

“It only has to slip one time in front of the wrong person.” I opened my hands before my nails could dig any deeper into my palms. Aubrey hadn’t meant anything by it, but accidents could still get me killed.

For a second we just looked at each other across that little office as I forced myself to calm down. It was an innocent mistake but we couldn’t have those.

“Skye,” she said, careful, setting the name in place like she was handling her good china. “Skye Mercer. Drive safe. Text me the second you get in that house.”

“I will.” I picked up my bag. At the door I stopped, because I couldn’t leave her standing there looking like that. “Thank you. For sending in the duds, Aubrey. I mean it.”

“That’s what I’m here for.” She already had the phone up to her ear. “Go home, girl.”

Home was a one-bedroom on the back end of a building that had seen its good years come and go, and I loved precisely one thing about it. It had a single door.

One door meant one point of failure. One thing to watch. I’d learned to think like that the hard way, learned it in a season I don’t revisit if I can help it, and I’d rebuilt my small quiet life around shaving the failures down to the fewest I could keep my eyes on at once.

That door had three deadbolts I put in myself, plus the one that came with the place, plus a steel bar that dropped into a bracket in the floor. My landlord didn’t know about them and I was definitely not getting my security deposit back. A small price to pay for safety.

The security camera that was over the doorframe fed straight to my phone. I’d checked that feed maybe forty times over the course of the day, outside the Banks house, in Aubrey’s parking lot and at every red light between there and here. Nobody came. Nobody ever comes. I checked anyway, because that was my life now.

I ran the locks in order, top to bottom, then spun around and threw every one of them again behind me, top to bottom, a little rhythm my hands do without asking permission. Then I did the thing I do every single evening that I would take to my grave before I said it out loud to a living soul. I pulled up the inside camera, the little one tucked on the bookshelf facing the room, and I stood there in my living room watching footage of my own living room, thumbing back through the empty hours of the day. Empty couch, empty carpet, just me walking in thirty seconds ago and freezing the frame.

Nobody had been inside. I could see that. Still, I watched until my heart finally slowed down.

If only I’d thought of all this years ago. Back when it would’ve counted for something. Back when watching a door might have changed how it all went down. I wasn’t always a woman who watched doors.

Once upon a time I was a woman who believed I was safe. I slept easy in a house full with everyone I loved. I thought safe was something you could own outright instead of something that gets lifted clean out your hands while your back is turned.

That woman paid for every dumb thing she believed. Paid the bill and I was still in debt. I built this new one out of deadbolts and camera feeds so nothing would ever get taken out from behind me again. Too late to matter now. I do it anyway.

I set the phone face-down on the counter and went to the bathroom to take a shower.

The water took a minute to get warm as I waited impatiently. I peeled out my interview clothes, folded them neatly out of pure habit, and caught myself in the mirror over the sink before I stepped in.

There I was. Skye Mercer. Whoever that was supposed to be.

And laid across my chest, riding just over the top of my heart, the scar. It was an ugly keloid slash that stretched almost as wide as my collarbones. I hated it. It was like a brand and the scars in my mind were enough of a reminder.

Baby killer.

The words moved through me like a lightning bolt, same as they do every night, in a voice I stopped being able to tell apart from my own a long time ago.

I looked at it a little longer. If I were still a high powered attorney, I would’ve gotten the thing lasered off by now. But those days are long over.

I stepped into the water. I ran it as hot as those sorry pipes would allow, and I did not cry. I used up all my crying back in another life, and it never once, not one time, made me feel better.