● CHAPTER 2: The Man in the Navy Suit
Three months earlier, Derek Sloan had arrived at Naomi’s apartment with a social worker, two police officers, and a smile that never reached his eyes.
He stood in the hallway under flickering fluorescent lights while Naomi’s downstairs neighbor peered through a cracked door. Malik stood behind Naomi with one arm around Jonah, both boys still wearing their pajamas. The younger one had a cereal stain on his sleeve. The older one had not spoken since Teresa’s funeral.
“Naomi,” Derek said gently, as if the whole thing pained him. “Don’t make this harder than it needs to be.”
Naomi had stared at the papers in the social worker’s hand. Emergency custody review. Temporary placement request. Financial instability. Unsafe housing. Emotional interference with guardianship process.
“Guardianship process?” Naomi said. “Teresa never named you guardian.”
Derek lowered his voice. “Teresa was my wife.”
“She was divorcing you.”
The smile vanished for half a second.
The social worker, a young woman with kind eyes and exhausted shoulders, cleared her throat. “Ms. Reeves, the court has received documentation indicating Mr. Sloan was listed as the children’s preferred guardian in the event of Mrs. Sloan’s death.”
“That’s a lie.”
Derek sighed. “This is what I mean. She’s overwhelmed. She has no savings, no room, no plan. I’m not the enemy here. I just want the boys safe.”
Malik had tightened his fingers into Naomi’s shirt. Jonah began to cry.
One of the officers softened. “Ma’am, we don’t want trouble.”
Naomi looked from the officer to Derek. She wanted to scream that trouble had already entered wearing a navy suit and polished shoes. But she knew how she looked: a tired woman in a cheap apartment, still wearing the black blouse from the funeral, surrounded by unpaid bills and children’s school papers.
Derek looked exactly like what judges trusted.
He was a senior partner at a private firm downtown. He donated to school foundations and smiled beside mayors in photographs. When Teresa married him, people said she had finally found safety after years of working double shifts. Naomi never believed it. Teresa had called her too often from locked bathrooms, speaking in a careful whisper, saying Derek was not who people thought he was.
Then one night, six weeks before the funeral, Teresa came to Naomi’s apartment with the boys and one duffel bag. Her left wrist was wrapped in a scarf.
“I’m leaving him,” she said.
Naomi did not ask questions in front of the children. She made hot chocolate, put on cartoons, and waited until the boys slept.
Teresa pulled a memory card from inside a lipstick tube.
“If anything happens to me,” she said, “this goes to the police.”
Naomi stared at it. “Tess, what did he do?”
Teresa looked toward the bedroom door, where Malik and Jonah slept curled together on the mattress. “He didn’t marry me because he loved me. He married me because of Dad’s land.”
Their father had left them forty acres outside the city. Not much to rich people, but to developers it was a treasure. Teresa’s portion had been placed in a family trust for the boys.
Naomi had reached for the memory card, but Teresa pulled it back.
“Not yet,” she said. “I need one more recording. Something he said about the papers.”
Two weeks later, Teresa was gone.
The official explanation sounded clean, sterile, final. An accident on a rainy road. No criminal charges. No witnesses.
But Malik stopped speaking after the funeral, and Jonah screamed whenever he saw Derek’s car.
Now, in the courtroom, with Derek claiming love and stability, Naomi remembered that hallway, that paperwork, and Teresa’s shaking fingers holding the memory card.
The card had vanished after the funeral.
Derek said it never existed.
May you like
Naomi had no proof.
Until Jonah said, “The truck knows.”
