Page 81 of Justice

“That’s the idea.” There was a pride in his voice he didn’t let out often. In the back seat Rita was going on about how her Alexander would’ve wept to see it, how this was the dream the family bled for, and Justice was soaking up every word of it.

I was smiling so hard my face hurt. For one blessed stretch of road I forgot every lie I was living. I was just a woman riding shotgun next to a good man who was building something beautiful, proud of him, happy for him, letting myself pretend the pretend was real.

Then we rounded the bend past the framed-up rec center, and I saw the sign.

Big. Blue and white. Staked at the mouth of the biggest job site on the whole development, right where the heavy equipment was tearing into the earth.

HARLOW CONSTRUCTION.

And underneath, smaller, a phone number and a slogan I had seen ten thousand times. On letterheads. On a truck in my own driveway. On the breast pocket of the man who used to come home and take my life apart with his hands.

The world tipped sideways.

I was not in that car anymore.

I was in a kitchen in Buckhead with my back against the refrigerator and Roman’s hand around my jaw, squeezing, my feet barely touching the floor. I could smell his cologne. I could hear the low, calm, reasonable voice he always used when he did it, because he never once yelled. He stayed gentle-voiced the entire time he was breaking me, and that was the thing that would have confused anyone.

“You made me do this. Look what you made me do.”

The back of his hand across my mouth. The taste of copper. The counter’s edge catching me in the ribs when I folded. Him stepping back to fix his cuffs in the hall mirror like he’d done nothing more strenuous than move a chair, while I stayed down on the tile counting my own breaths, learning the exact arithmetic of when it was safe to get up.

I remembered the concealer. That’s what came back sharpest. Standing at my bathroom mirror before work with the good concealer, the full-coverage kind, painting it over the bruise blooming along my cheekbone. Layering it. Setting it. Checking it in three different lights so nobody at the firm would see what my husband did. A grown woman with a law degree, hiding her own face to go argue other people’s cases.

And I remembered the night I finally ran. The one that was bad enough that there wasn’t a version of staying left in me. The night I understood, down in my bones, that if I did not get out of that house I was going to die in it. And that he would fix his cuffs in the mirror afterward, then look them in the eye and mean every word when he told them how much he loved me.

That was the man whose name was staked into Justice Banks’s dream in blue and white.

“Skye.”

Justice’s voice reached me from very far away.

“Skye. You alright?”

I came back into my body. The car. The sunlight. Rita humming in the back. Justice half-turned in the driver’s seat, watching me with a little crease between his brows, because I’d gone somewhere and he’d felt it happen.

“I’m fine.” My voice came out almost level. I don’t know how. Five years of practice, I suppose. “Sorry. I just, I got overwhelmed for a second.” I made myself smile. Made myself look right at him. Pointed my chin at all that steel and dust like it was the view that had knocked the wind out of me, not the sign. “Look at all this. Justice, I’m so proud of you. I mean that. Look what you built.”

Whatever he’d seen on my face, he let it go, because I’d handed him something true to explain it. The moment passed over us and moved on.

He turned back to the wheel and eased us on down the road, pointing out where the school would go, the health clinic, the little market. Rita clapped her hands. And I sat there in that beautiful car, in that beautiful lie, with my body still shaking under my skin where nobody could see it.

I waited until Justice was deep in telling Rita about the school site, the two of them lit up in the front while I sat back with my phone low in my lap where nobody could see it.

My hands were not steady. I typed it fast, before the fear could talk me back out of it.

I can’t do this later. I can’t wait. He’s here, Duke. Roman’s not just in town, he’s IN it. He’s building the development with Justice. I need to move soon.

The three dots came up almost right away. Duke never was far from his phone when it came to me.

Slow down, cuz. Breathe. Don’t do nothing crazy tonight.

Then, a second later:

We’ll figure it out before he finds out where you are.

I looked up from the phone, out the windshield at all that dust and promise sliding by, then over at the side of Justice’s face while he talked, animated, happy, closer to peace than I’d ever seen him. The man I had no right to. The life I could not keep and did not want to leave.

I put the phone back in my lap and typed one word.