I turn the feeling over in my hands and check it the way I check everything now, looking for the heat at the center of it, the first lick of flame.
There's no flame. It stays small.
I go inside and take the night dose from the square marked for tonight, and I lie down in a quiet house with the window cracked.
For once, the quiet doesn't press down on me the way it has every other night out here. It doesn't feel like a thing I have to hold my breath against.
It feels like a room I might get to live in.
I don't sleep right away.
I lie there and listen to the pines tick in the breeze, and I think about a laugh I heard through the trees, and I let myself wonder who she is.
CHAPTER THREE
Sophie
Karen has a folder on her desk with my name on the tab, and she keeps her hand flat on top of it the whole time she's talking, like she's afraid of what'll happen if she lets me see what’s inside.
"I need you to know I'm on your side here," she says. "I want that said first, before anything else."
I'm sitting in the chair across from her with my hands folded in my lap the way I was taught to fold them, and I can feel my pulse going in my throat. "Okay."
"A letter came in to the board on Friday afternoon." She pauses. Her thumb moves back and forth across the folder's edge. "It makes some allegations about you. About your conduct."
"My conduct?"
"With a minor."
The words don't hit me all at once.
They come in pieces, the way a burn does—first the contact, then the heat a half second behind it.
"That's not—" My mouth has gone dry. I swallow and start over. "Karen, that's not true. Whatever it says, it's not true. I would never—you know me."
"I do know you." She says it fast, and she means it, and it doesn't help as much as it should. "Sophie, I’ve known you since you were a student-teacher in this building. If it were up to me, this letter would already be in the shredder."
"Then shred it."
"I can't." Her hand presses flatter on the folder. "It didn't come in alone. There were attachments."
The floor goes unsteady under the chair and settles.
"What sort of attachments?"
She doesn't answer right away, and that's its own answer.
"Karen. What attachments?"
"Screenshots." She won't quite look at me when she says it. "I'm not allowed to show them to you, not while it's under review. But there are screenshots, Sophie. Messages. They look like they came from you."
I sit there.
I'm trying to think of a single message I've ever sent that could be cut and turned and made to look like the thing she's not saying out loud, and there isn't one, because I haven't sent one, because there's nothing to find. And that's when the cold comes up through me, slow, from the soles of my feet.
There's nothing to find.
Which means somebody made it.
