Page 22 of Justice

Me: I got it for now. If I do, I’ll let you know.

Was Kira about to become a problem? She reeked of desperation, and it was starting to irritate me. I set the phone face-down and got back to my work, letting thoughts of her evaporate from my mind.

It was. The trouble was, the woman my mind went to instead wasn’t Kira at all.

My thoughts about Skye ran all over me until I couldn’t focus on the work in front of me. The woman living under my roof now had her hooks in me. She was sharp in places a caregiver had no reason to be sharp, and it made me wonder who she really was underneath those scrubs. The way she’d handled my daughter at dinner the night before sat with me. There was something to it. She’d waved it off, blamed it on a love of true crime, gave me an easy smile and changed the subject.

I let it go at the table. I don’t let much go for long.

The agency ran background checks, and Ellis Staffing was one of the most reputable in the city, so on paper I had no reason to look. But paper had never once kept me alive. I needed to see for myself.

So I typed her name in.

Skye Mercer.

I sat there while the machine did its work. I told myself I was just being careful, just running the same check I ran on anybody who slept under a roof with my grandmother and my babies. But my intuition was telling me there was more.

The report came back, and it was clean. Licensed CNA, current. A lease, a couple of quiet jobs, a bank account that never did anything worth looking at twice. No arrests, no mess, no exes with a grievance and a filing fee. Nothing.

I leaned back in my chair and sat with it.

I wanted to find something. That was the truth I didn’t much like about myself right then. I’d gone looking for a reason, a red flag, a thread to pull, and the paper hadn’t given me one. Just a woman who’d lived a small, careful, unremarkable life. Maybe that was all she was. Maybe the sharpness I kept catching was nothing but a smart woman who read too much and watched too much television. Maybe I was a paranoid man who’d spent his life learning to find the danger in every room whether there was one or not.

Ellis Staffing didn’t put their name behind just anybody. That agency had turned away more people than they’d ever sent, and they’d vouched for Skye Mercer like she was blood. And my grandmother, who could smell a phony through a brick wall, who’d run off every other soul we brought through that door, lit up like Christmas every time this woman walked in the room.

So I let it go.

Not all the way. I don’t have an all-the-way in me. As I closed the report I realized that maybe her clean record was a good thing. God knew this family was due one.

But I didn’t delete the file. I just closed it. I’d make sure to keep an eye on it. For now, I’d let the woman with the quiet past stay in my house.

The women took over Mehar’s place that evening to finalize the plans for my baby’s birthday. I sat in the middle of it like a man watching weather move in. I could’ve stayed home and let them handle it, but Mehar had summoned, and I couldn’t tell her no.

She had the party spread across her dining table. A binder, a color scheme, a mood board with a castle on it. Mehar and Zainab leading the charge about this party. They were both excited for the theme. And Serenity moved between them with the baby monitor clipped to her jeans, Sarai down the hall napping, my sister with only a few days left in this city before New York swallowed her up.

“Your babygirl is so spoiled.” Mehar tapped the mood board. “She wants to be a princess and she’s getting it. The Castle at Forest Glen. Gowns, a throne, the whole fairy tale. That baby is going to think she’s royalty for one day, and she’s going to be right.”

“She’s gonna lose her mind,” I said, and I meant it. For a second the weight I carried everywhere set down and let me be nothing but a father whose baby was about to be happy.

“Mm.” Zainab was watching me over a roll of ribbon. Watching too long. “What?”

“Nothing.” She glanced at Mehar. Mehar glanced back. Something passed between the two of them that I did not care for.

“It’s just,” Zainab said slow, “you seem different.”

“Different how.”

“Lighter.” Mehar set her pen down and joined the ambush, because that’s what this was now, a coordinated operation. “You laughed twice since you sat down. I counted. You don’t laugh twice in a week, Justice, let alone a night. Something’s got you good.”

“Y’all reaching.”

“Are we?” Serenity’s voice came soft from the end of the table. When I looked at my baby sister she had her head tilted, studying me.

“I’m just at peace that we’re all in a good place. Me and my brothers ain’t at war. Nobody is on trial. We’re just normal right now, doing family shit.”

The table went quiet. Even Mehar and Zainab quit playing.

I thought about lying. I was good at it. But these were the women who’d carried my family on their backs while I was drowning, and they’d earned better than a lie, even if I wasn’t ready to hand them the truth.