Myegg, maybe, knocked out of the bag I dropped without noticing I'd dropped it, my groceries scattered around my feet on the hot ground.
A second one hits my shoulder.
Nobody laughs.
It's worse than if they laughed.
They watch, their faces gone hard and righteous, while a grown woman stands in a parking lot getting pelted with her own groceries, and not one of them moves to stop it—not the usher, not the mother of the twins.
Not Patricia.
Patricia.
She's there, at the edge of it, in her good cardigan with her purse held in both hands.
The woman who taught me the books of the Bible with felt cutouts when I was nine.
Who let me cry in her kitchen the summer my dog died.
She's not throwing anything. She's not saying anything.
She's just standing there, watching them do it to me, and the not-helping is its own kind of egg, the one that hits hardest and leaves no mark anybody else can see.
"Patricia," I say. Just her name. A question I don't have the words for.
She looks at the ground.
That's the moment it breaks me, more than the yolk drying on my face or Beverly's perfume or the predator word still hanging in the air.
The oldest, gentlest face in my whole childhood, looking at the asphalt so she won't have to look at me.
I get down on the hot ground and pick up my groceries with shaking hands because I will not leave them there, because some animal part of me refuses to let them have the dog food I drove here to buy.
I get the bag back together and stand up.
I make myself walk through the gap they leave me—they do leave me a gap, they part for me like I'm something they don't want to brush against—and I get in my truck and lock the door.
I don’t cry until I'm three streets away and there's no one left to see it.
* * *
I don't remember the drive back.
I come back into my body in Njal's gravel driveway with the engine ticking and my face stiff with dried egg and salt.
His bike isn't here yet, and I sit there a minute, not sure I have the legs to make it inside.
Then headlights swing in behind me.
He's off the bike before it's fully stopped, helmet shoved back, and he's at my door, pulling it open. His face does a thing I've never seen it do—goes from worried to murderous to something wrenched all in the space of a breath, taking in the egg in my hair and the wreck of me behind the wheel.
"Who?" It comes out of him low and flat and terrible. "Sophie. Who did this?"
"It doesn't matter."
"It matters to me."
"It was the whole town, Njal." I get the words out, and they come apart at the edges. "It was everybody. It was Beverly, the usher, and the mom of the twins and—and Patricia juststoodthere?—"
