"You didn't call the table down here for a paint job at a coffee shop," he says, quiet now, the grin set aside. "Dag doesn't get Runes out of bed for small shit. So whatever this is, it's not small. And whatever it is, it's got your name wrapped around it because you don't get on your knees for a stranger."
I keep my eyes on the spokes.
"There's a woman," I say.
"Yeah." He says it gently. "I know there's a woman. I knew the second Ma said you've been cooking. You don't cook for people, Njal. You barely cook for yourself."
I sit back on my heels.
And because it's him, because it's the one person alive who was in the room before either of us could talk, who watched me come apart in the spring and watched them lock the door and waited for me to come out of that damn place—I tell him.
Not all of it. The important bits.
A woman, a lie built to bury her, a campaign too clean and too funded to be what it's pretending to be, and the thing under it I haven't said to anyone yet.
I care, that it's real, how I have feelings for her.
Bjorn listens the way he listens, which is all the way down.
When I'm done, he's quiet for a while.
"You sure?" he asks. "And I'm not asking the soft way. I'm asking the way only I get to ask you. Yousureit's the real thing, and not?—"
"Not the other thing." I meet his eyes. "I'm sure. I run the check every day, Bjorn. There's no lift. No racing heart. I sleep. I eat. I take my pills with my breakfast. It's just a woman, and I want her, and it's the plainest thing I've felt in years."
He studies me for a long moment, my own face looking back at me older, harder, and kinder than I ever see it from the inside.
"Okay," he says finally. "Then let's go see our Prez."
Runes takes me in the chapel with the door shut.
He doesn't sit behind the table.
He leans against the edge of it with his arms crossed, and he lets me stand there a while in the quiet.
"Dag laid it all out," he says. "The letter. The fake messages. The photo. I've seen the work somebody did on this girl." He tilts his head. "It's good work. Ugly, but good. Somebody knew exactly what they were doing."
"I was thinkin’ the same thing, Prez."
"Esperanza's got her teeth in it. She'll make that school board produce what they can't, and it'll come apart." He uncrosses his arms. "I'm not worried about it. Dag and Esperanza could win this in their sleep. So that's not why I called you in here."
I wait.
"I called you in here," Runes says, "because the last time you were certain about a woman, I had three bodies to think about and a prospect on a locked ward. There was a time I sat at that table and wondered if I'd ever get you back." He says it flatly, laid on the wood between us. "So I'm going to ask you one question, son, and I want you to look at me when you answer it. Who is this woman to you?"
There it is.
The question I knew was coming since the porch, since Dag's text in the dark.
The one I've been turning over the whole ride up, an hour of highway with the wind taking the words out of my mouth before I could practice them.
The honest thing is I've been afraid of this question.
Not because I don't know the answer. Because I do, and saying it out loud to the one man whose opinion can end my road back makes it real.
I look at him.
"She's the first thing since I got well that I've wanted and known I wasallowedto want," I tell him. "I checked it, Runes. I checked it the way they taught me. It's not the sickness. It's just a woman, and she's good, and somebody's trying to destroy her for no reason I can find, and I?—"
