“Ma’am, are you okay?”
She was confident the responding officers were the same ones she’d seen cruising by. She nodded, not sure her voice was steady yet.
“She needs an ambulance,” Royce said.
She shook her head. “Maybe later,” she said softly.
Royce didn’t look satisfied, but he pressed his lips together.
“Who are you?” the shorter officer asked, pointing at Charity, who was now slowly walking down the hall, holding her cell phone. JC assumed that she’d been the one to call the police.
Even being in the neighborhood, they would have arrived too late. If Royce hadn’t come, she’d be dead. How had he found her?
“I’m Charity. Charity White.”
“Do you know this man?” the same officer asked.
Charity nodded. “Bobby. Bobby Boyd. This is his apartment. I’ve been...living here.”
The cop began writing in the small notepad he’d pulled from his breast pocket.
“And what’s the relationship between you and Ms. Cambridge?” the taller Hispanic officer asked.
“We don’t have a relationship,” Charity said. “This is the first time I ever met her. Her mom was friends with my mom.”
That wasn’t exactly what JC had told Charity. My mother knew your mother. That had been her explanation as to why she’d sought out Charity.
But JC kept her mouth shut. It certainly wasn’t the time to blurt out that she and Charity might be half sisters.
From there, things moved pretty quickly. The cops talked quietly to Bobby, who was coming around. An ambulance arrived. Bobby looked small and nonthreatening on the gurney. His eyes were filled with anger but he stayed quiet, as if he’d maybe been in this situation before and understood the importance of keeping his mouth shut.
After he was gone, Royce guided her over to the couch and made sure she was sitting before talking quietly to the cops in the kitchen.
Then it was Charity’s turn. The heavier, younger cop motioned for Charity to join him in the kitchen. JC twisted her neck, watching, but the cop stood in front of Charity, blocking JC’s view.
The Hispanic officer pulled up a folding chair in front of her, forcing her to turn her back to Charity. It dawned on her that it was not by chance they were doing their best to question them separately in the small apartment. No doubt they wanted to see if their stories matched.
Royce stood behind her, his hands flat on the back of the couch. He did not interrupt or ask any questions, which was probably why the cop let him stay. The questions were easy at first. Full name. Address. Phone where she could be reached.
“Walk me through what happened once you arrived here,” the cop said.
“Charity was in the bedroom, trying to get her cat, when Mr. Boyd arrived home. I tried to engage him in conversation. But he appeared angry and I was concerned for Charity’s safety. She’d already confided in me on the telephone and in person that she was afraid of the man. He pushed me, I kicked him in self-defense and then he took a swing at me. I ducked but then he started choking me.” She kept her voice steady, dispassionate, as if she was reporting revenue figures at a board meeting.
The cop looked up from his report. She could almost see the message that passed from the cop to Royce as the two locked eyes. She’s damn lucky you got here.
Nobody needed to point that out to her.
The officer stood up. “I think I’ve got this.”
It was just a few minutes more before Charity and the other officer completed their quiet conversation in the kitchen. Then the two cops left almost as quickly as they’d arrived.
JC stood in the living room. The space was strangely quiet. She looked at Royce. “This will be inadequate, but thank you.”
Thank you. She’d probably been less than a minute away from being choked to death and now she was calmly thanking him. “I don’t know what the hell you were thinking,” he said. Better that than tell her she’d taken ten years off his damn life. “I told you to lock the door. I assumed it was understood that you needed to stay behind it, stay locked in, protected.”
He was practically spitting his words. He took a breath, reaching for calm. Charity was watching them closely, obviously listening. The woman looked to be early twenties and she might be very pretty with a little more meat on her bones and those stupid piercings removed.
So their moms had been friends. That was nice, but given that Jules had never actually met Charity, wasn’t it a bit much that she’d immediately dropped everything to come to the woman’s rescue?
Of course it was. If it had been anybody else. But Jules was...a good person. Truly decent. Despite everything, he believed that. Once she’d realized that Charity was in trouble, she’d have wanted to help.
He could easily imagine the convoluted reasoning. Their mothers had been friends. Ergo, Jules’s mom would have wanted her to help Charity.
He knew, from the many conversations they’d had eight years ago, that the summer Jules was fourteen, she and her mother had been in a car accident. Jules had suffered a serious leg injury but survived. Her mother had died. It had been a devastating loss and Jules had confessed that most everything she’d done or accomplished after that had been because it would have made her mom proud.
Graduate at the top of her high school class. Proud mom.
Finish college in three years. Proud mom.
Go to graduate school and get a great job afterward. Proud mom.
So he wasn’t second-guessing her motivation to help Charity. None of that, however, made him any less angry that she hadn’t thought twice about the promise she’d given him to stay at the hotel.
She could have died. He’d blown every red light and totally disregarded any speed limit. But still, he’d almost been too late. She needed to understand that she’d been both foolish and very, very lucky.
So that she never did anything like it again until he could figure out where this threat was coming from and neutralize it.
“How did you know where I was?” she asked.
“Valet remembered the intersection. Once I got here, there was an old woman sweeping her sidewalk.”
“I didn’t think she saw me.”
“Old people watch what’s going on in their neighborhoods. She saw you come into this building. Otherwise, I’d have had no idea where to search.” He’d yelled at the old lady, asking if she’d seen a dark-haired woman in a blue sweater, and she’d pointed at the middle building. He’d wasted precious minutes on the second floor before he’d gotten to the third and heard Jules yelling for help.
He’d come through the door, knowing that he was going to kill whoever was harming her. He supposed he was lucky that he’d had to stop to keep her from dropping like a stone to the floor.
Otherwise, it would likely have gone very differently with the cops.
“Are you sure you don’t want to see a doctor?” he asked. Her neck was still red and he knew the bruising was coming. He’d feel a lot better if she was checked out.
“No,” she said. She looked at Charity. “Get your cat and let’s go.”
“But Bobby’s going to jail,” the young woman said. She reached for one of the half-full chip bags on the counter, as if the