TWENTY-FIVE

I wait for the other shoe to drop.

Ora pulls me inside the house, throws a random robe around me, tosses a towel on the floor to soak up the rainwater.

I expect her to berate me, to curse at me. She doesn’t.

“How much did you hear?” I ask.

“Enough.” Monotone.

“I am so, so sorry. I didn’t mean for anything to happen with Aaron. It just—”

Ora silences me. “It was what I thought,” she says. “All the time you alone together. The way he look at you.” She hums. Her eyes shine, but she keeps a straight face. “Chicken and me grew up like family. And so it is. It’s… okay.”

“It’s not. I know it’s not.”

“You right. But…” Ora squeezes the robe I’m wearing. “Just wish you told me. All this make me feel like… Juney was right. Like I didn’t know you. Thought you trust me.”

“I do.”

“If you did, you would have tell me the truth. Joy, Aaron, all of it. Straight up.” She sighs. “But it’s what you do. You lock up everything like a safe. It make sense.”

“I’m sorry. For real.”

Ora gives a light smile, shows off that gap between her front teeth. “What are sisters without a little drama, yeah?”

After Joy, I know I don’t deserve a friend like Ora. But she’s here, and forgiving, and kind. And for as long as she’ll have me, I will keep her in my life. I’ll try to treat her as well as she’s treated me. Even when I didn’t earn it. Like right now.

She finds some clothes for me to change into, and when I’m not a drenched rat anymore, she leads me back to the living room. Simone and Josh sit, drinking hot tea and chicken soup to warm up. If they heard me and Ora talking earlier, they don’t let on. It feels almost normal, all of this.

Almost.

Maybe the unsettled feeling is me. All my secrets are out there. I’ve lost Aaron. I’m exhausted in every possible way.

Then Simone clears her throat.

“Since we all being honest…” She homes in on me. “I want to apologize, Bambi. Was mad that you thought I could be lying with Mr. Hall. Still am, to be honest. But I see you didn’t want me getting hurt.”

“I was just… worried. And I didn’t know how to help.” I lean forward. “The Young Birds wouldn’t be the same without you.”

“Appreciate that.” Simone twists a ring on her finger. I don’t usually see her in jewelry. “But I’ll tell the truth. I was up to something. You just didn’t know what.”

Josh puts his bowl of soup on the floor. “What you mean?”

“Well…” She taps her nails against her cup. “I’ve been leaking Mr. Hall’s dirty laundry to the press.”

I’m sorry, what?

It makes a little bit of sense, if that’s why Simone didn’t like me forcing my nose into her business, searching for info, all of that. I could have blown her cover. “But… why?”

She slowly places the mug on the coffee table. “Mr. Hall think charity is smiling at me while I scrub his toilet. The pay small, but I have work, so he feel he’s helping people like me.” Simone massages her palms, her knuckles. “I break my back so he can relax. I struggle so he never will. Burned me up so.” Her hands still. “One day, I was cleaning, and heard Dante and his father arguing about money, where it come from, what Mr. Hall do with it. Dante realize the man steal from more than just the staff. He take from his own charities.”

That tracks with what I heard. Dante seems so pissed about his dad, so frustrated by how he’s perceived compared to who he actually is.

“So why didn’t Dante just expose Hall himself?” Ora asks. “Why drag you into it, risk your safety?”

“Since when you care about safety, Rush?”

“Since now! I not going to let you take the fall for no spoiled boy.”

“Well, Dante had no proof. So his father laugh in his face and shove him off.” Simone stops twisting her ring. “That’s when I came to him. Said I’d help find evidence. His father would never look at me twice.” She smiles, the most mischievous I’ve ever seen her. “Hall think I’m stupid, can’t understand anything he leave ’round me. Good for me. Bad for him.”

“Sneaky girl,” Josh says, half-amazed, like he’s seeing Simone for the first time. “Then you sweet up big boss, dust some file cabinets…”

“Right, right. Take everything, give it to Dante, the news. Do it daily. Man has a lot of issues to expose.”

When I ran into Dante after coming home from the rum bar, he was fully dressed at, like, three in the morning. He must have met with someone to hand over information he and Simone had found. He’s probably been at this since before I showed up.

I grab Simone’s arm. “So, the night I saw you by Ian’s office…?”

“Always on the clock, girl.”

The deep voice I heard must have been Dante’s, not Ian’s.

“Dante have some balls after all,” Josh admits.

Ora cuts him off. “So, what, everything we done chat ’bout true? Hall lie, steal, cheat? Kill?”

Rumors can start in truth, right?

“Him lie, yes. Steal, absolutely. Cheat—on the wife and everywhere else.” Simone leans back on the sofa. “A killer, though? That, I don’t know for sure. But can’t put it past him.”

I rub my eyes. Ora is right about one thing: this is all fucking bonkers. And it makes sense, almost all of it. But…

“Dante, though? He was working with you?”

“Yes. Why? What wrong with him?”

“Everything you guys giggled about weeks ago,” I say. “You all said he was cold and snobby and rude.” Even when he and I talked in the garden, it was like the moment I glimpsed a real person, he shut me out.

“Him all those things, won’t lie. But also good-hearted when it count, and good to me. For my help, he give extra pay. Needed it since Mama got sick. Helped me work events for the family to keep everyone fed and clothed. More real charity in him than his father.” So she really was hustling her ass off 24/7.

“All that time together just for work?” Ora asks.

“Mind your business, Rush. Now can I have a second with Bambi, please?”

Ora holds up her hands and pivots away to safety. She and Josh pretend they’re not listening.

“Again, I am sorry,” Simone says.

“Don’t. You were doing what you had to do.”

“No, not that,” she says. “From the moment you arrive, I treat you different.”

“I wouldn’t trust me either,” I tell her.

“Was more than that. I didn’t like you.”

Well, shit, she didn’t have to say it like that.

“You had it easy,” Simone explains. “You come, eat and drink whatever you want, pick up toys, and make three or four times what I make just by playing with the pickney all day.” I don’t argue that I did more than that. I let her talk. “Meanwhile, I scrimp and save and scrub until my back ache.”

She’s right. She could take care of Luis and Jada just as well as I did. Hell, I was getting paid for a position I literally stole while Simone’s suffering to keep her family from going hungry.

“Didn’t think that you might have your own problems,” Simone confesses. “Your life seem like sugar. But you know the saying.”

“I don’t. I’m sorry.” Even now, the Jamaican American card is at risk of being revoked.

“Not everything that have sugar sweet.” That’s true for me. True of the Halls. Even true of Joy, I think.

“You don’t have to apologize. But… thanks.”

“And for what it’s worth?” she adds. “I say forget those people in New York. They don’t know you.”

“They know what I did.”

“They think they do. They know the exciting parts. But to judge you for what you did at your worst? And ignore what you are like at your best? Selective memory.”

Simone has the same graciousness that Aaron used to show me before he knew everything. The same mercy Ora’s shown me tonight. And Simone’s kind enough to cut me the slack I can’t. “But I don’t know if I can forgive myself,” I murmur. “Joy was my best friend. I betrayed her.”

“A little shame is good. Makes you learn, do better. But you can’t live your whole life in shame.” She holds my hand. This tenderness from her makes me want to cry. “You try save me when I only ever sneer at you. You’re a good person, Bambi. When you see that? You’ll be free. Truly free.”

A clap of thunder vibrates the walls. The storm’s moving in.

Josh stands from the tile floor. He’s piled his dishes into a neat stack. “I gotta go.”

“Go where?” Simone asks. “In this weather?”

“Got a whole heap a food from Blackbead hidden somewhere. Don’t want anything to get damaged. Need to protect it from the storm.”

“If you die out there, you can’t help anyone,” Ora snaps. “Don’t be reckless.”

“The warning don’t mean much, coming from you, Rush.”

“Why now, Robin Hood?” I ask.

He shrugs. “We all being brave. Can’t have you all being more man than me.” He grins, that annoying shit-eating grin.

“No bigger man than Scoob,” I say.

“Big Man Scoob,” Ora repeats. She pulls him into a hug before he rushes out the door in hopes of beating the worst of the wind and rain.

Another rolling boom. “Mama asleep in her room. The boys gone. The house is officially locked down,” Ora declares.

So together, we three wait out the storm. Lights flashing, the floor of Ora’s house shaking. She checks the windows and doors to make sure the water stays out. But her place isn’t built to withstand weather like this. Darkness hangs on the house, on the world outside.

“What if we play a game?” Ora suggests. “Two Truths and a Lie?”

“No,” Simone and I answer at the same time.

I’m not sure what to do, what’s next, where to go. I ask the powers that be, if they exist, for a sign. Because soon, I’ll need to make some decisions and clean up the mess I made. But I don’t even know which direction to stumble in.

A sharp crack of thunder sounds. Bright lightning flares through the curtained windows. It’s almost as intense as the bolt from earlier, the one that streaked across the sky toward Blackbead House and absolutely could have killed me.

Toward Blackbead.

The light. Freakishly bright and brilliant.

The truth in the light.

The last thing the duppy told me before I bailed.

It’s crazy, like everything with that damn ghost. But was the lightning from the road a sign? A message?

An arrow showing me where to go?

I thought I’d need to figure out my next escape route. But maybe it’s time to stop running from the truth.

Maybe I need to head right toward it.

I whip out my phone.

“What?” Aaron’s ticked when he picks up.

“I know you’re mad at me,” I whisper, “and you should be, but I need a favor. It’s important.”

Silence.

“Please.”

He sighs. Heavily.

“Where we goin’?”