My voice catches and I let it.
"I want to help her the right way," I say. "The clean way. Dag's way. Not my hands. I know what my hands do when I let the certainty drive. I'm not letting it drive. I'm asking the table instead of going down there and handling it myself, and the fact that I can make that decision, even if it kills me, is the whole reason I'm standing in front of you a man and not a problem."
Runes looks at me for a long, long moment.
Something moves in his face that he doesn't bother to hide.
"That," he says quietly, "is the answer of a man who came back. The Njal who went up to that place couldn't have said that sentence. Couldn't have wanted the clean way. Would've had blood on him." He pushes off the table. "You want the table behind this girl, you've got it. We do it Dag's way. We bring our weight where it helps, and we keep our hands where they belong. And if it ever needs to be more than that—" his eyes go flat and old "—then it'll be the table's call, made cold, not yours made hot. You understand the line I'm drawing?"
"I understand it."
"Good." He almost smiles. "Then go finish Tor's bike. You're still a prospect, certainty about a woman or not."
* * *
I'm back in the yard with the rag when my phone goes off against my hip.
I almost don't look. You don't pull your phone out in the middle of a job, not as a prospect, not with half the table still milling in the lot.
But it buzzes again.
And then again, fast, three times, four, the way a phone does when it's not one message but a flood of them coming in all at once, and something in the back of my neck goes cold before my hand's even moving.
It's Sophie.
The first thing is just words.
Njal. Njal, it's everywhere. She put it everywhere.
Then the images start loading.
Screenshots of screenshots.
A Facebook post shared four hundred times before noon.
The fabricated messages I already know by heart, except now they're not in a sealed folder at the school board, they're out in the open with a thousand comments stacked underneath.
A town group with her name in the subject line.
The words people are using.
Predator.Around our kids.
The deacon's own daughter.
Somebody's made a graphic of her school photo with a word stamped across it I won't even think in the same breath as her name.
The rag's still in my other hand.
I look down at it like I don't know how it got there, and I set it on Tor's seat slowly, deliberately, because I want nothing more than to kill these bastards for doing it to her.
I stand up off the concrete slowly.
"Njal." Bjorn's already reading my face. "What is it?"
I hand him the phone.
He looks. His jaw works.
