Page 98 of Justice

“The box was locked, Keenan. How did you open it?”

He looked at the floor again. Didn’t answer.

“Keenan. How did you get into the box?”

“It wasn’t locked,” he replied.

I knew I locked that box. I knew it.

I am a careful woman. I grew up around guns. My father taught me to shoot when I was twelve. I bought that firearm legally, stored it in a lockbox with a code on the top shelf of my bedroom closet. Only I knew the code. At least I thought only I knew it.

The police didn’t see it that way. They saw a dead toddler, an unsecured weapon, and a mother who wasn’t home. But my sister was with them.

“Melody Harlow.” The detective stepped in front of me while I was still on my knees on the pavement. “You are under arrest for criminally negligent storage of a firearm resulting in the death of a minor. You have the right to remain silent.”

He kept talking. I stopped hearing him. They put me in handcuffs in my interview suit on the street where I lived, in front of my neighbors, in front of my sister, thirty feet from my daughter’s body. I didn’t fight it. I didn’t say a word. There was nothing left in me to fight with.

It hit me in the back of the squad car. Not grief. That was already everywhere, filling every space in me until there was no room for air. What hit me was the question I couldn’t stop asking.

How did Keenan get into that box?

And then I heard it. Clear as day, cutting through the sirens and the ringing in my ears. My son’s voice from two weeks ago, sitting on the living room floor pointing a toy pistol at the TV.

Daddy says shooting is what men do.

Yep, that sounded just like Roman.

All the gun talk. All the “this is what men do”, conversations. The toy guns he kept buying Keenan even after I threw them away. The shooting range he built in his back yard that he allowed our eight-year-old to shoot without telling me. The way my son held that toy pistol with both hands steady, like somebody had spent real time teaching him the stance.

Roman did this.

He sowed this into our son. He planted it, watered it, trained it into an eight-year-old boy and then he stepped back and let it happen. He didn’t pull the trigger. He didn’t have to. He built a weapon out of our child and pointed him at our daughter and walked away clean.

I sat in the back of that squad car in handcuffs, in my interview suit, with my daughter’s blood still on my skirt from holding her, and I understood for the first time exactly what kind of man I had married.

And I knew. Sitting there in those cuffs with my life in ruins around me. I knew that nobody would ever believe me. That the story would be the negligent mother, the unsecured gun, the tragic accident. That Roman would show up to the funeral in a black suit and cry real tears. Everybody would feel sorry for him. That he would take my son and raise him into something worse. Nobody would see it. Nobody ever does. Men like Roman know how to look good to everybody on the outside while they destroy everything behind closed doors.

My baby was dead. My son was gone. I was in handcuffs.

And the man who did all of it was about to walk away without a scratch.

51

SKYE

I opened the door and there she was. Arms crossed, hip cocked, a smirk on her face that was very sinister.

“I know you were in my room,” Storie said, and pushed past me into my bedroom before I could stop her.

“Excuse me?”

“Don’t play dumb. You went through my closet.” She turned to face me. “So what did you find?”

I shut the door behind us. If we were doing this, nobody else in this house was going to hear it.

“I found two empty bottles of antifreeze.” My voice didn’t shake. “You killed Midnite. You poisoned that horse and you let your father blame Kira for it. And I’m telling him.”

Storie didn’t flinch. She smiled wider.