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“Your lawyer still thinks you’ve got this?”
John exhales. “Lawyers think whatever you pay them to think.”
“That bad?”
“I don’t know.” He slides the photo into the clear waterproof sleeve in his pocket but keeps his hand there. “Sherry’s fighting everything.”
Oh, I know.
Sherry cheated. She says after the marriage was already over, but John, along with anyone who has half a brain, calls bullshit. She’s made every stage of the divorce uglier, arguing and demanding shit she shouldn’t have any rights to.
John couldn’t care less about the other stuff, like the money or the house, but she, of course, has to go after the only thing he wants.
The boy smiling in those photos.
“She still wants full?” I ask.
“Yeah.” My buddy covers his face with his palms, then rests his forearms on his knees. “But I’m done fucking around with that shit.”
I study him. “Did something happen? With the kid?”
“He cried last time. Didn’t want to go back.”
Damn. “Kids cry, though, right?”
“Not my Kammie,” he says softly.
“Did he say something to you?”
“That he wanted to stay with me.”
“Okay?”
“He begged me, Ade,” he says, his voice turning ragged. “He was scared.”
Fuck. “Of Sherry?”
“He said no, but you know how kids are, even if you’ve never had one. They don’t like saying shit like that, especially about a parent.”
A motorcycle passes outside.
Garcia whispers, “Movement.”
Everyone freezes as a man appears at the gate.
Garcia scans him and reports, “Local. Gray shirt. We’ve seen him twice.”
The man lights a cigarette, then leaves, and the tension in the room dissipates.
“She gets mean,” John continues quietly, staring at the ceiling above us.
I look at him. “Sherry?”
“Yeah.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means she says shit to him.”
