Page 64 of Justice

“You’re a good boy,” she said, settling into bed, patting my hand once before I pulled the blanket up over her. “Always was.”

I sat with her a minute after her eyes closed, running back through everything she’d just said, trying to figure out how much of it was real memory dressed up in the wrong names and how much of it was nothing at all. Did she kill her father? Her sister-in-law was a threat? My grandmother had built an empire but she had so many secrets. There were so many things she was keeping locked up inside. The next time she was lucid, I planned on asking her about family. She was always tight-lipped about them.

After I had finished tucking my grandmother in, I checked in on my daughters. Dream was fast asleep and Storie was pretending. I heard her pull the blanket up when I opened her door but I decided not to bother her.

I then went to the kitchen for a nightcap. When I entered, I noticed Skye was there. It was as if she were waiting on me.

“We need to talk,” she started.

“Uh oh. Nothing ever good comes from we need to talk. We ain’t even make it out the honeymoon phase yet,” I approached her, ready to grab her and pull her close to me.

She gently held her hand out and stopped.

“I’m serious.”

“What happened? Who I gotta kill?” I asked with all sincerity.

A sly grin played across her beautiful face. “Your own daughter,” she replied.

“What did my little demon do?”

“Yeah, you should name her Nightmare. You have a Dream and a Nightmare,” she rolled her eyes.”

“Damn, what the fuck did she do?”

“She came at me on some real mean shit. She’s disrespectful, Justice, and that’s your daughter. But I won’t tolerate it. I wanted to knock her teeth out of her head…” she explained to me that Storie called her a booty-wiper and not a real nurse.

“I’m gon’ handle it. I swear.”

“She’s too angry. You really have to get her in with a therapist or something. I know you’ve punished her but that’s not enough,” she said.

“I hear you. I’ll go talk to her now,” I replied.

I thought about the years since Monica passed, all the ways I’d handled Storie’s attitude, her grades slipping, her mouth getting sharper every single month. I’d chalked every bit of it up to grief and teenage rebellion tangled together, something she’d grow out of on her own time. And then I had been dealing with so much family shit. Serenity and Quest. I hadn’t once stopped to think that grief left untreated long enough might not be something a kid grows out of at all. Might be something that just grows.

“I should’ve handled that a long time ago,” I said.

“I’m not trying to pile on you. I just think she needs real help. Somebody trained for exactly this.”

“You’re right.” I rubbed a hand down my face. “I reached out to a few people today, actually. I’ll follow up tomorrow.”

Skye came around the island and put her hand on my arm, with no argument left in her voice at all. “I think that’s the right move. And for what it’s worth, I don’t think it’s too late. Kids are resilient, especially when the people around them show up for them.”

“You really believe that?”

“I have to.” Her eyes did something when she said it. Gone before I could ask what it meant. “Otherwise none of us would have any hope at all.”

I let that sit a second, wondering what exactly she meant by all of us, whether she was talking about Storie or Dream or Rita or somebody else entirely that I didn’t know a thing about. Wasn’t the time to push on it though, not with everything else already sitting heavy in that kitchen.

“Tomorrow,” I said again, more to myself than to her. “First thing. I’ll call around, find somebody good, get her in before the week’s out if I can.”

Skye nodded and I ran upstairs to Nightmare’s room. She tried to pretend she was asleep but I flipped the lights on, grabbed her phone and told her she was on punishment for three months. No malls. No phone. No TV. No mother fuckin’ nothing. She protested and protested before finally saying.

“I’ll apologize to Skye tomorrow.”

But when she said it, there was a look behind her eyes I couldn’t quite place. I needed to get help for her a.s.a.p. before she officially turned into my opp.

34