I'm just sitting on the top step with my arms around my knees, watching a wasp work the underside of the railing, feeling scooped out and strange, and he comes through the screen door and sits down beside me without a word and waits.
"They fired me," I tell the yard. "By letter. Not in the best interest of the students."
He doesn't sayI'm sorry,because he's learned I don't want it, and he doesn't tell me it's going to be okay, because he doesn't insult me with things neither of us can promise.
"You loved that job," he says instead.
"I was good at it." My voice comes out flat and far away. "I was so good at it, Njal. I'm not saying that to brag. I'm saying itbecause it was the one thing in my whole life I never doubted. I doubted God, and I doubted my family, and I doubted whether I was allowed to want anything, but I never once doubted that I was a good teacher. And they took it away from me. They put it in a letter and decided it wasn't true anymore."
His hand settles on the back of my neck, warm and heavy, and I lean into it without deciding to.
"It's still true," he says. "A letter from a coward doesn't make it less true. It just means they don't get you anymore. Those kids don't get you anymore. That's their loss, and it's a big one, and they'll spend years not knowing how big."
I sit in the warmth of his hand, and I want to lean my whole weight into it, to let him be right, to let one person's version of me be the true one for once.
But underneath the want is a cold flat current that's been building for days, and I feel it pulling at me now, and I'm too tired to swim against it.
* * *
The phone call from Dag and Esperanza comes that afternoon.
Njal puts it on speaker on the kitchen table, the two of us leaning over it like it's a fire we're trying to warm our hands at.
"First," Esperanza says, and her voice is the kind that's used to walking into rooms and changing the temperature of them, "I want you to hear me say this plainly, Sophie, because you've had a lot of people lately tell you ugly things in careful language. So here's some careful language that's on your side for once. They terminated you in writing, on the basis of fabricated evidence, after we'd already put them on formal notice that the evidence was fabricated and demanded they preserve it. Do you understand what they did?"
"They fired me," I say.
"They handed us a lawsuit." Dag's voice now, dry and certain. "Wrongful termination. Defamation. They built the whole case for us and signed it. The minute they couldn't produce a clean chain of custody on those images and fired you anyway, they stopped being a school board with a problem and became a defendant with a checkbook."
"We're going to sue them," Esperanza says, "and we're going to win, and it's not going to be close. I've handled a dozen of these. This is the cleanest I've seen. By the time we're done, the number on the check is going to have commas in it that surprise you."
I should feel something. Relief, maybe. Vindication.
Instead, I just feel the cold current pull a little harder.
"What about who made the pictures?" I hear myself ask. "The actual person. Do we know who did this to me yet?"
A pause on the line. I watch Njal's jaw go still.
"We're working on it," Dag says, and the pause before it does more talking than the words do.
The one that meansnot in front of the client."The production demand has a clock on it. When they fail to meet it—and they will fail—a lot of doors open. We'll know more soon."
"Soon," I repeat.
"Soon," Esperanza says, gentler now. "You hang on, Sophie. You've got more people in your corner than you think."
That's exactly the problem, I don't say. The people in my corner are what's killing me.
I make it through dinner.
I make it through Njal cooking again, through the careful normalcy of it, through Hoagie begging at the table and getting a piece of chicken he didn't earn.
I smile in the right places, and I hold it together right up until we're doing the dishes, and Njal says, easy as anything, "Bjorn'scoming down this weekend. Wants to officially meet you. And Ma's been asking when she gets to feed you."
The cold current finally pulls me under.
"You should tell them not to come."
