Page 16 of Justice

After, she lay with her head on my chest, tracing lazy circles on my skin, and I could feel her working up to something before she said it.

“You know,” she started, careful, “I could just come to the house. Save us both the drive and the room. The girls are asleep anyway. They’d never even know I was there.”

“No.”

It came out flat and final, no room in it for a second try.

“Justice…”

“I’m not doing this under the same roof as my daughters.” I sat up, and her head slid off my chest. Ready to return home, I reached for my shirt. “Not ever. I’m not fuckin’ another woman while they’re under my roof. That’s their home and they need to feel comfortable there.”

She was quiet a second, and I heard her decide to push anyway, which was the thing about Kira lately. She kept pushing on a door I’d told her a hundred times was nailed shut.

“You’re allowed to move on, you know.” Her voice went soft, went reaching. “It’s been three years. Monica loved you. She would’ve wanted you to be happy. She would’ve wanted you to move on and⁠—”

“Don’t.” The word came out of me low and cold, the register that empties rooms. I turned and looked at her, and whatever she saw in my face made her go still. “Don’t speak Monica’s name to me again. Not to make a case for yourself. Not for any reason. You don’t get to tell me what she would have wanted. You don’t get to use her like that.”

“Justice, I didn’t mean…”

“I know what you meant.” I stood and buttoned my shirt, already somewhere else, already gone. “We’re done for tonight. And if you push this shit again, we’ll be done for good.”

The hurt moved across her face plain, and under it a thing that had been growing in her these last few months that I kept pretending not to see. She wanted more. She wanted the thing I’d told her on day one she would never get. And every time she reached for it, I felt the arrangement getting heavier, felt myself dragging a woman along behind me toward a cliff she couldn’t see.

I checked the door-cam one more time. Everything looked good. Both my girls still safe.

“Get home safe,” I told her, gentler, because she was still Monica’s best friend and my daughters’ godmother. None of this shit was worth turning cruel over.

Then I left her there in that suite with her feelings and that big pretty view she’d paid too much to be lonely in front of. Rode the elevator down alone. And the whole way home through the empty three a.m. streets, I did not let myself think about the truth of it. That I’d spent the last few hours with one woman and craved a different one the entire time.

A caregiver. My grandmother’s caregiver. A woman I knew nothing about, who’d been in my life for barely any time.

I was in more trouble than Kira would ever be.

9

SKYE

BEFORE

“Melly Mel! God, you’re a sight for sore eyes. Please tell me something good,” Solo’s eyes pried into me. He was digging for a sliver of information that meant he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life behind bars. And I had it.

“I got the video. Timestamped of you nowhere near the crime scene.”

The consultation room at the jail was gray on gray. A steel table bolted to the floor, two chairs, a camera in the corner that hadn’t worked in years. I walked in dressed like money because I was money then. The suit was custom, cut to my body by a man in Buckhead who knew my measurements by heart. The heels were high enough to put me eye to eye with any man who thought about testing me, and red on the bottom so he’d know exactly what he was looking at. I set my file on that steel table and I sat down across from Solomon Sheffield.

“And then their evidence is weak,” I said. “I’ve read every page of what the State’s holding twice, and they do not have it. It’s circumstantial, it’s thin, and half of it falls apart the second I put it in front of a jury. I know it looks like the walls are closing in on you in here. I need you to hear me when I tell you they are not.” I held his eyes across that steel table. “I’m going to walk you out of this. You know how good I am. I don’t lose.”

And Solomon Sheffield looked at me like I was the first solid ground he’d stood on in months. His eyes went wet. He reached across that table and wrapped both his big hands around mine, and his voice broke open.

“Thank you,” he said. “God bless you. You don’t know what this means. I got a family. I got babies. Thank you. I know you’re the best, that’s why I hired you.”

And I was the absolute best in defense. I was too green to have my own law firm yet, but it was a goal of mine. My personal life was a hot mess from this separation with my ex-husband. But professionally, I was always on top.

“Save the thank-yous for when it’s done.” I gave his hands a squeeze, gathered my file, and stood. “I’ll see you soon.”

Then I walked out of that gray room in my expensive heels, certain as sunrise, a woman who had never once been wrong about a case she believed in.

I had no idea the walls were already coming down. Not on him. On me. And not from any direction I was watching.