by Moriah Jovan
She sighed and looked away from Justice as if hiding something, but she caught the glimmer of something on her cheek and her breath caught.
Giselle Cox cries.
Justice said nothing more as Giselle’s foot stroked the accelerator down farther and she glanced between the road and the dusk.
* * * * *
“Hey, kid,” called Bryce (he had forbidden her to call him “Mr. Kenard” anymore) Sunday morning when she finally rousted herself out of bed and found her hosts in the front yard . . . building a flower bed. He flashed a smile at her that was so warm and welcoming that she felt like she’d acquired an older brother.
“Good morning, Justice,” Giselle said as she slapped mortar on a brick with a trowel.
“Not that way, Giselle,” Bryce muttered when he saw what she’d done. “Here, like this.”
Justice kept her laugh to herself as she sat cross-legged in the grass to watch the two of them together, the way she teased him out of his impatience, the way he teased her into a blush. She sighed then, wondering if she and Knox would ever get to that.
“Not if he keeps leaving me every weekend,” she whispered to herself.
“What’s that?”
“Nothing,” Justice replied, then figured it couldn’t hurt to try these people for the answers neither Knox nor Sebastian would give her. She knew better, really, but . . . “Why am I here?” she asked sharply.
Both Giselle and Bryce stopped and looked at her warily, then looked at each other.
“You mean, why are you here on Earth?” Bryce asked slowly and Justice’s eyes narrowed at his deliberate misunderstanding.
Giselle laughed and poked him with an elbow. “You’re not in Scotland anymore, pal.”
He cast her an amused scowl, but looked back at Justice. “Look, Justice, we can try to make things as comfortable as we can for you, but you came back, so you have to ride this ride alone. Either wait until he’s ready to come to you and explain, or demand the answers, or leave him for good. I’ll be honest and tell you I don’t like what he’s done to you, any of it, but this . . . Your wedding—” He threw up a hand. “I’ve known Knox for twenty years, Giselle and Sebastian have known him their whole lives, and none of us can figure out why he did that or what he was thinking when he did it. It wouldn’t be fair to you for us to speculate.”
“I doubt even he knows why,” Giselle added. “He’s not always, mmmm . . . ”
“Sane.”
Giselle nodded when Bryce pulled that word out of the air. “That’s it. Sane.”
So Fen really wasn’t her biggest problem; living with Knox, building a life with him, was, just as Sebastian had already told her. No, that hadn’t figured into her imaginings. She didn’t quite remember what she’d imagined now, but she was pretty sure it had involved chocolate and roses and candlelight—
—from an experienced man who would lead her through life with him, teach her how to hold up her end of a relationship with him. So much for that.
“I want you to know something,” Bryce said then, with that infamous Kenard fierceness, and she understood again that she was not the target of Knox’s family’s anger. “If we had known Knox was planning to force you at gunpoint, it wouldn’t have happened at all.”
“I’m sorry I took you back there, Justice,” Giselle whispered, biting her lip. “I didn’t know how far he’d go. Please forgive me.”
Oh. Justice gulped, the remnants of her anger and mistrust slowly seeping away. She looked away, across the street, and waited a few beats just to make the point, then nodded. “Okay.”
After a few moments of an uneasy silence, Giselle broke it abruptly. “When’s your birthday?”
“August twenty-fifth.”
“Three weeks! You’ll be what, twenty-five?”
“Yes.” Justice didn’t want to think about her birthday. Usually, it was just a day that passed by like any other without fanfare or notice. But until Giselle had asked, she hadn’t known how much she had wanted and hoped that Knox would know that, would recognize it for her somehow.
“If you could have anything in the world for a present, what would it be?”
For Knox to love me.
She shrugged. “I don’t know.”
Bryce sighed and turned back to work, but Giselle still stood, her expression one of speculation.
“Don’t you have anybody in the world?”
Justice hesitated when, for the first time, she realized how alone she was in space and time. “No,” she whispered, and looked away. “Just my online friends, my followers. If you can even count that. I try not to, but it’s difficult when that’s all you’ve got.” She paused. “There’s one in particular,” she admitted reluctantly. “He— Well, I mean— It’s like he always knows what I’m thinking.”
“It’s easy to get attached to people online, isn’t it?”
Justice looked up at Giselle, surprised. “You?”
She shrugged. “Sure. I don’t get along with women very well and it’s really my own fault. Then I ran across a few female kindred spirits online and when I don’t feel like talking or rousing any online rabble, I can just walk away from the computer for a while.”
“And they don’t get in her personal space,” Mr. Kenard muttered absently.
“That’s a plus. I read your blogs. Who’s your favorite commenter?”
“Hamlet.”
Giselle stilled and stared at her. “Really.” She exchanged glances with her husband. More subtext. Always subtext with these people.
“I would have liked to have met him in real life. I emailed him once about a year and a half ago, but I don’t think he got it because he didn’t reply.”
“How’d all that happen, Justice? The politics, the blogs?” Bryce asked, looking over his shoulder at her with blatant curiosity as he buttered and set bricks. “You’re way too young to have that kind of influence.”
“My mother,” she began slowly, trying to coalesce her thoughts into some logical pattern. “Her name was Liberty. Well, Libertas. She went by Libby. And my grandfather. He taught me about American history, about the Constitution. He was a constitutional lawyer.”
“What was his name?” Bryce asked.
“Juell Pope.”
They looked as shocked as she’d expected them to.
“I didn’t know until I went to law school. He always joked that he was just an old country lawyer with more time than money.” She told them about him, about her mother, how much she missed them both, only vaguely noticing that Bryce and Giselle had stopped working completely to listen to her. She told them about her father, her farm, and how much she didn’t miss that.
The sound of sniffles broke into her tale and she saw Giselle with her head bowed, looking at the ground. Bryce leaned on a spade, also not looking at Justice.
As the silence lengthened, Bryce murmured, “So you made a name for yourself.”
“In print, anyway. The first piece I published in the UMKC Law Review I wrote when I was seventeen. My grandfather set me the topic and told me where to look for the information.”
“Seventeen,” he breathed.
“He— He didn’t live to see it published,” she whispered. “I hope he was proud of me. He said it was C work.”
Giselle lifted her head then and she saw the tears streaking her face. Giselle Cox cries! Justice still couldn’t credit it. “C work?” she demanded. “That was not C work.”
“I know that now,” Justice said quietly, suddenly proud of what she had accomplished—that she had done it on her own, without ever once invoking her grandfather’s name. “He said that because it gave me something to reach for. He was like that. I’d do anything, reach farther than was possible if I thought he might tell me I did B work. What do you have left to do if you do A work all the time?
“He loved the Internet when it came along. He took to it so easily. He loved Usenet and IRC and almost nobody knows how to get there anymore . . . Blogging and IM before their ti
me, I suppose. I was posting before I left high school. I just wasn’t doing it under my own name. I was afraid that— And then Knox, he— He defended me. I sent in a piece to the National Review that weekend and . . . it was accepted.”
A long silence turned longer until Justice squirmed. “You would never have submitted that article if he hadn’t said what he did that day,” Bryce said, a question more than a statement.
“No.”
“And you started blogging and tagging your posts with your name,” Giselle said.
“And I linked everything else I’d ever said online. That first article for the law review got me a lot of credible attention through my professors, which is why I just kind of . . . overnight, it seemed. Both academically and online. Knox doesn’t know; I’m not even sure he knows what an ISP is, much less wireless broadband, much less follow any blogs. Everything’s on my CV. If he read it, it didn’t seem to register.”
Giselle laughed through her tears, then dashed them away with her fingers. “That’s ’cause he’s got shit for brains,” she groused good-naturedly, her humor seeming to have been restored.
Bryce threw a grin at his wife. “That hasn’t changed in twenty years, either.”
Then they both laughed. Giselle approached Justice, holding her hands out to pull her up, then drew her into her personal space for a bear hug. “You’re not alone in the world anymore, Justice. You have us now. Let’s go eat.”
* * * * *
85: PERSONAL SPACE
Thursday afternoon, Justice’s email chimed.
*
Subject: Come to my house tomorrow night. Pack a bag. nm
Reply-to: [email protected]
*
Justice snorted. Yes, indeed, she could be as autocratic as Justice’s “shit-for-brains husband.”
“You must be my new sister-in-law,” an unfamiliar female voice called to her Saturday morning from the area of the couch, startling Justice just as she descended the last two steps of the Kenards’ staircase. Suddenly, a gorgeous blonde sat up, discarding the book she’d been reading and smiled at her. Justice gasped.
“You look like Knox!”
“That would stand to reason,” she said and arose to engulf Justice in her arms. “Considering we share a mother.”
Justice hesitantly wrapped her arms around this blonde Amazon who was as soft and lush as Giselle was small and firm. She smelled different from Giselle, too, more flowery and delicate. It suited her, Justice thought, and then wondered what the perfume she had chosen during Makeover Week said about her. Really, she wondered how she fit in with these sophisticated ladies who were so much older than she, who had to know so much more about life, about men and sex.
“I didn’t know Knox had a sister,” Justice murmured as she pulled away from her, embarrassed about that fact. It only highlighted her sketchy knowledge of her husband versus her vast ignorance.
“Well, don’t feel bad about that,” she returned. “Knox didn’t know he had a sister until about a month ago.”
Justice’s mouth dropped open as she stepped back, noticing only then the scar down her face, her broken nose, and her eyes—her eyes!—two different colors. “How can you not know you have a sister for almost forty years?”
“When your mother’s a raging bitch and doesn’t tell anyone she had you,” she said with genuine amusement. “Giselle and I have been waiting for you to wake up so we can go to the spa.”
The spa . . . Justice could certainly get used to this life, Knox or not. Then something else occurred to her. “Does this mean I have the mother-in-law from hell?”
“It most certainly does mean that,” came Bryce’s deep voice from the back porch as he and Giselle came clattering in the house.
“Trudy Hilliard,” said Knox’s sister—Justice’s sister-in-law—said. “Fen’s my father.”
Justice gasped and stepped back, her hand on her mouth, thoroughly shocked and confused. Had she been delivered here as some sort of sacrificial lamb? All three of them watched her warily as she swiftly discarded all scenarios and all combinations of scenarios that didn’t make sense. Then her hand fell and she drew a deep breath as she drew her conclusions and said, “I think I understand. At least in principle.”
“Trudy’s really the evil one,” Giselle offered. “I don’t think Fen started out that way.”
“Just weak and easily seduced,” Bryce said, a wry tone in his voice that made Giselle laugh. “That’s how it is with us.”
Justice looked at him, confused. “Us?”
“Men. We’re all weak and easily seduced.” He almost laughed, but Justice didn’t find that terribly funny or apropos under the circumstances, considering Knox wasn’t around to be seduced even if she were inclined to try. Apparently, her new sister-in-law, whose name she still didn’t know, found it no funnier than she did.
“Well, shit, I’m sorry,” he said with a sigh and turned to go back outside. “I’ll just shut up now.”
Giselle could barely contain her amusement as she watched him leave, and suddenly the woman beside her laughed. “Justice, my name is Eilis Logan.”
“Eilis,” Justice repeated slowly, letting that roll out on her tongue. “That’s beautiful. How do you spell it?”
She obliged, then said, “I am in dire need of exfoliation. Let’s go.”
An hour later, Justice found herself soaking up to her neck in a sunken tub filled with orange blossoms while some strange concoction made of cocoa powder did something to her face. Both Eilis and Giselle were arranged thusly, each in her own tub after having chosen different combinations of scents and scrubs. A sense of contentment stole over her as she relaxed and listened to what she supposed constituted girl talk for forty-year-old women: sex—
—about which Justice knew next to nothing firsthand except what she’d always done to herself when fantasizing about Knox, and what Knox had done to her out in the grass.
“Justice,” Giselle said, startling her out of her musings. “Did you read that book?”
She didn’t have to ask what book. “Yes,” she said, a little embarrassed, but amused and trying not to laugh.
“And?”
“And I thought it was the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever read next to Atlas Shrugged.”
Giselle burst out laughing.
“What book?” Eilis mumbled from under her cucumber mask.
“The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty,” Justice returned smartly.
It was Eilis’s turn to laugh. “Oh, now that didn’t turn you on? Not even a little bit?”
“I couldn’t suspend my disbelief enough to get turned on,” she said airily, though it was the teensiest, eensiest bit of a small fib.
“Suspension of disbelief isn’t a requirement for reading erotica, Justice,” Giselle said dryly.
“Yes, I know, thanks.”
“Well, Giselle,” Eilis said, “you’re deviant, you have to admit.”
Giselle sniffed. “Can’t help it.” Then her head came up sharply as she gaped at Eilis. “How do you know I’m deviant?”
“You aren’t quiet about it.”
“Boy, ain’t that the truth,” Justice muttered under her breath and she started when both women burst out laughing. She huffed and said the first thing that popped into her head. “And you have a perpetual bite mark on the back of your neck. It’s not even a hickey. It’s a bite. Do you two turn into cats at sundown?”
Giselle and Eilis screamed with laughter, and for the first time in years, Justice felt like she belonged somewhere, truly belonged. Knox’s desertion of her had served a purpose she didn’t know needed served and now she didn’t resent him for it so much. She wondered if Knox had arranged this, to this end. It wouldn’t surprise her if he had.
Justice had family now and they wanted her to be comfortable, to fit in. She was soaking in a tub next to a woman who, six weeks ago, had awed and intimidated her; she hadn’t even known whether to trust her or not. Now, today, she had teased Giselle
about her sex life, which made Justice feel terribly liberated all of a sudden. Wanted. Cherished.
“Eilis,” Justice said suddenly, “please tell me about your mother.”
“Ask Giselle.”
“Trudy,” Giselle said before Justice could do so, “is beautiful, like supermodel beautiful. None of her sisters are like that, including my mother. She’s always used her beauty to get her way and she’s never not gotten her way, except at home. My mom says she was always rebellious and married Knox’s father just to get out from under Grandpa Dunham’s thumb. All Trudy cares about is her own comfort and satisfaction. Eilis and Knox inconvenienced her and believe me, all hell breaks loose if Trudy’s inconvenienced.”
Justice sneaked a peek at Eilis, but could tell nothing of what she was thinking under all that goop. “Eilis?”
“Oh, I have nothing to add,” she said with alacrity. “Giselle knows her better than I do.”
That stunned Justice so much that the silence lengthened until Eilis began to speak, “just a few tidbits,” but that was more than enough. Justice thought she might just die of vicarious pain, but Eilis was curiously matter-of-fact. Justice couldn’t help but remark upon that.
“Well, now it’s kind of like it happened to someone else. Once I talked about it, shared it with someone who accepted me in spite of it, it became almost irrelevant. My life is in the here and now. What happened then got me here and I like where I am.” She paused. “For the most part.”
Giselle reached a hand out and patted Eilis on the arm. “Eilis, please,” she murmured. “He misspoke. If you’d just let him explain—”
“I don’t want to talk about it, Giselle,” Eilis snapped, and though Justice wanted to know what all that was about, she kept her mouth shut. Then Eilis took a deep breath and said, “I’m ready for my massage.”
The three of them spent the rest of the afternoon in relative silence, each with a masseuse, and Justice had no need to talk during a massage and certainly no need to listen to anybody else talk. She drove home Sunday evening with a promise from Eilis to invite her and Knox over for dinner some time soon. “We’re still getting to know each other on a basis other than prosecutor-and-victim.”