Page 9 of Justice

“You brought him in. He’s your responsibility.”

I pulled the chair back and sat down.

“I’ma sit right here. You handle it.”

Bryce looked at Bam. Then he looked at me.

I didn’t move.

Bryce was shaking. He looked at Bam, and Bam looked back at him, and something passed between them, all those years, Baltimore, whatever they’d been to each other before tonight. Bryce’s hand trembled at his side.

He hesitated but he did it. He slit Bam’s throat.

I watched the horror move across his face while he did it. The grief of it. This man was his friend. And I watched his terror of me rise up and swallow that grief whole, because in this family fear outranks love, and everybody learns it eventually. It was fast, at least. I’ll give Bryce that. When it was over he stood there in the middle of that concrete room breathing hard, another man’s blood dark across his shirt and his hands, staring down at what he’d done like he didn’t recognize the parts of himself that did it.

In this family we’ve all had to make some rough calls about ending those who are closest to us.

I stood, set the folding chair back against the wall, and fixed my sleeves.

“Get it cleaned up,” I told the two men by the door, and they moved.

Then I walked over to Bryce, and I put my hand on the back of his neck the way you would a son, the way you would somebody you loved. He flinched under it. Good.

“You did right calling me,” I said. “You did wrong bringing him in the first place.” I let that settle. “You bring me another dud, and it’s you in that chair next time. I mean that. I know you family. I know Mehar love you.” My hand tightened, just slightly, just enough. “You already on thin ice with me, lil brother. Don’t test how thin.”

“It won’t happen again.” He couldn’t look at me. “I swear it won’t.”

“Oh, I know it won’t.” I patted his cheek once, and let him go.

I rode the elevator back up out of the dark. The doors opened on all that gold light, laughter, and money, the beautiful bright thing we built to sit on top of everything we buried. I fixed my coat in the mirrored wall and stepped out into it, and not one soul who saw me pass would have guessed where I’d just been.

That was the gift of me. I could love you past all reason. But cross me, lie to me, betray this family — and I’d bury you smiling.

Nobody ever got a lie past me. Not once in my life.

5

SKYE

Rita Banks’s home held so much history. I felt it the second I stepped in for the interview. There was a rich energy buzzing all through the place. It was impossible not to feel.

It sat back off a quiet street in a historic Black neighborhood. This was the DC the tour buses never showed you. Not the marble monuments, not the museums with the free admission.

The other DC. Chocolate City. The one that raised bank presidents, church mothers, and numbers men in the same Sunday pew. The one that built Black wealth up out of U Street back when the rest of the country still wanted us coming through the back door.

Rita’s block was one of those old gold-star streets where doctors, undertakers, and school principals had been buying up brick and handing it down for four generations. Where the money stayed quiet and the history stayed loud. Where every third house had raised somebody whose name ended up on a scholarship, a church program, a street sign. You could feel every bit of it the moment you turned the corner. Legacy. Roots I would never have, because I’d had to burn mine clean to the ground to stay alive.

It was the largest house on the street. It was one of those older houses built with brick, with a deep front porch, a swing nobody was sitting on, and a screen door in front of the real one. A house with flowers in the beds, a floral wreath on the door, and beautiful bay windows.

It wasn’t a mansion. It was better than a mansion. It was a home with heart. The sort of place where the door’s lock had a dozen keys floating around, because family was always coming through it, where a pot was always going on the stove and nobody left without a plate. I pulled my raggedy little car into the driveway behind a Mercedes truck. I sat there a second, and I hated how much I wanted to belong to a house like that one.

Because I’d had one once. A home, people in it, my name on the mailbox and my baby’s shoes by the door. I knew exactly what it cost to lose it, down to the penny, and here I was pulling up to somebody else’s, about to walk in and pretend I was nobody at all. I cut the engine and checked my face in the mirror. Smile, Skye.

Not a lie, exactly. Just the version of me that could walk through a door like that one and belong there. Just the warm, easy, harmless version of me. The one that didn’t check every window for the shape of a man who wasn’t there. I’d gotten so good at her that some days I couldn’t find the seam where she ended and I began, and that scared me worse than getting caught ever could.

Serenity opened the door before I finished knocking, a baby propped on her hip.

She was pretty in a soft, unguarded way, younger than the brothers and gentler around the edges. There was story written in her eyes. The baby was the first line of it. A chunky, gorgeous little thing, seven or eight months old, brown as a pecan with a puff of soft curls and two cheeks you wanted to press your face into. She had one fist wound up in her mama’s collar, and she looked at me like she was deciding whether I was worth that bubbly little glare.