"For the record," she says finally, and the smile's all the way out now, wobbly and real, "this is the worst proposal-of-anything I've ever heard. You skipped about nine steps. There was no dinner. You compared me to library property."
"Noted."
"And I'm still mad you didn't ask."
"Then ask me back." I shrug. "Even it up. Go on."
She narrows her eyes at me. Sets her jaw. And says, with all the wrecked dignity she's got left after the week she's had: "Njal, will you be my—" She falters, because none of the words fit what this is. "Mine?"
"Yeah," I tell her. "I will. Already am."
"Then I guess you can pay my rent." She says it like she's doing me a favor, and I let her have that too. "But I'm paying you back. Every cent. When this is over, and I'm working again."
"You won't, but okay."
"I will."
"You won't." I bring her knuckles to my mouth. "But I love that you think you will."
We close out the shift a little after four, and Meghan sends us off with a bag of day-old pastries and a look at me that says I'd better take care of her, because the women in this family communicate entirely in looks and baked goods.
In the truck, before I turn the key, my phone buzzes.
It's not Sophie this time.
It's Dag, and the message is short, the way Dag's messages always are when something's actually moving.
Dag:Esperanza filed this morning. Demand for production—every original file, device, account, the whole chain behind those images. They've got thirty days. They don't have it, Njal. Nobody fabricates this clean and keeps the receipts lying around. When they can't produce, the whole thing starts to come down, and we start finding out who built it.
I read it twice.
I don't say anything out loud, because Sophie's had enough today, and the part of this that's a hunt is mine and the table's, not hers.
She's spent two days getting hit.
She doesn't need to know yet that I've started, in the back of my head, building a list—who'd have the money, who'd have the reach, who'd have the reason to spend real resources burning down a second-grade teacher in a town this size.
Because Dag's right. This is too clean.
Somebody paid for this, or knew how to do it for free, and either way it means somebody wanted Sophie Crockett gone bad enough to learn how to do all this.
No one spends that kind of effort on nothing.
There's a reason under this, buried somewhere, and I'm going to know it before this is done.
I think about the work itself, the way Runes described it—good, ugly, made by somebody who knew exactly which soft place to aim for.
You don't aim that carefully at a stranger.
You aim that carefully when you've studied a person, or when you've studied what destroying them gets you.
A second-grade teacher with a hound dog, a truck, and a daddy who preaches doesn't have an enemy with those kinds of resources. Not on her own.
Which means the resources came for a reason that's bigger than her, and she's standing in the middle of it without knowing why.
Somewhere, there's someone who built a monster out of a good woman and went to bed satisfied.
I'm going to find that person.
