Page 70 of Slander
"I heard." Her voice doesn't crack, but something moves under it. "Carol Whitfield's been keeping Mama updated, and Mama can't help herself, she called me. I'm so sorry, Soph. I'm so sorry they did this to you."
"How did you survive it?" It comes out raw, not really a question. "When they all turned on you. When Mama and Daddy looked at you like you were… when they prayed over you instead of helping you. How did you live through people deciding you were broken when you knew you weren't?"
The line is quiet for a moment.
"I didn't, at first," Hannah says. "You were too young to see most of it, and I'm glad. I went somewhere pretty dark for a while, thinking if everybody who was supposed to love me saw a monster, maybe they were right and I was the one who couldn't see straight." She breathes. "And then one day, I figured out the only opinion of me that was going to keep me alive was my own. So I stopped waiting for them to give me back to myself. I left. I got my own apartment and my own job and my own doctor, and I built a life full of people who met me as I am instead of the story somebody told about me."
"Was it lonely?"
"For a while. And then it wasn't because I let the right ones in." A pause. "Soph. Can I ask you something? This man. The biker. Is he one of the right ones? Mama told me a little bit."
I think about him asleep in the bed behind me, the man who shut off the kitchen faucet and told me I didn't get to call his woman a monster.
"Yeah," I say, and it comes out certain in a way almost nothing has lately. "He really is."
"Good." Hannah lets out a breath. "Because I've been scared for you, you know. Not scared you'd break—you're tougher than I ever was, you always were. Scared you'd do what I almost did. Decide the story was true because enough people told it. I spent two years believing I was the broken thing in our family because that's what the prayers were for, fixing the broken thing, and it took me a long time to understand the prayers were the broken thing, and I was fine the whole time." Her voice steadies. "You're not guilty. Whatever the town decided, whatever Daddy texted you—ignore it."
"I'm trying."
"I know you are. And here's what I know, baby sister, from the far side of everything you're walking through." Her voice goes low and fierce. "You don't owe that town your future. You don't owe Mama and Daddy a single thing, not your forgiveness and not your forever. You get to leave. You get to pick a place where nobody knows the story and build a whole new one. I did it an hour up the road and you could too, and Lord, Sophie—you could be near me again."
The wasp from yesterday is back, working the same stretch of railing.
I watch it and feel something crack open in my chest that's been sealed shut my whole life.
"Tallahassee," I say.
"Tallahassee," Hannah says, and I can hear her smiling through the worst week of my life. "Just saying. There's a whole world up here, and it's only an hour from a town that doesn't deserve you, and your sister's in it. Apparently so is a whole motorcycle club that your boyfriend is part of." She laughs softly. "Think about it. That's all I'm saying. Think about getting out."
After we hang up, I sit on the porch for a long time with the phone warm in my hand.
The morning comes up gold over a yard I'm renting in a town that threw eggs at me.
For the first time, I let myself think about the possibility.
I could leave.
It doesn't feel like I’d be running.
It feels like the first door anybody's ever shown me that opens instead of locking.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Njal
Twenty-six days into the thirty the court gave them, the school board's lawyers stop answering Esperanza's calls.
That's how we know we've got them.
Dag explains it to me on the phone while I'm splitting wood behind the rental, the axe a good clean weight in my hands and the work keeping the worst of me busy the way I need it to.
"Silence is an answer," he says. "When a defense firm goes quiet on a production demand they can't meet, it means they've looked at what they'd have to hand over and decided getting sanctioned hurts less than getting caught. They can't produce a clean origin for those images, Njal. Because there isn't one. Somebody built them, and doing it leaves a trail. They've realized the trail doesn't lead anywhere they want a judge to look."
"So where does it lead?" I set another round on the block. "Because I've been making my own list up here, and I want to know if mine matches yours."
A pause. I can hear Dag deciding how much to give me.
"Esperanza pulled the metadata our forensic guy stripped off the files that went public," he says finally. "The ones the PTAwoman posted. People think deleting something makes it gone. It doesn't. It just moves it somewhere they've stopped looking." Another pause. "The files were built on a computer that's been used before. Same hand, same tools, same little signatures the software leaves whether you want it to or not. And one of the earlier jobs off that same machine wasn't a fake at all. It was a flyer. A church flyer, Njal. For a revival. With a name on it as the man who made it."
