Page 56 of Slander
I read it twice.
I have to look up at the sky for a second because the gap between those two things is so wide, I can't hold both ends of it at once.
Her father looked at a lie and chose the lie.
He looked at his own child—a good woman, the best I know—and decided the machine was telling the truth, and she was the one who'd gone wrong.
Come home and let us pray over you.
Like she's a thing with a demon in it.
Like the answer to a daughter being destroyed is to destroy what's left of her certainty that she's sane.
I think about my father's hand still warm on the back of my neck.
I think aboutcome home to us,the way mine said it through a locked door seven years ago, when they had every reason in the world to be ashamed of me and chose to drive an hour every week instead.
And I shake my head slowly because there's no sense to be made of it.
A man gets a daughter like Sophie and throws her in the fire to keep his own good name dry.
I came up out of a warehouse with three men dead behind me, and my family saidcome home.
She graded papers and fed her dog and sat in her pew her whole life and hers saysturn yourself in.
I don't understand it. I don't think I'm built to understand how fucked up this is.
I think about Sophie last night—she told me about it in pieces over the phone this morning, before any of this broke, her voice going flat the way it does when she's holding something heavy very still.
Her father telling her she sounded like her sick sister. Her mother looking at her plate.
The whole family choosing this fucked up fabrication over the girl they raised.
And now this, on top of it.
A second knife in the same wound, twisted by the same hand that should've been the last one in the world to hold it.
My family had every reason to throw me out.
I gave them blood, a trial, a locked ward, and so much more.
Not one of them ever once looked at me the way that text looks at her.
I know which kind of man I want to be standing next to her when the smoke clears.
I text her back before I'm even fully decided because my hands have decided for me.
To: Sophie
I'm coming home. Right now. Don't answer the door for anybody but me. Don't read the comments. I'll be there in an hour.
The three dots come up. Stop. Come back.
From: Sophie
Okay. Please hurry.
"Go," Runes says behind me. He's read it over my shoulder, all of it, and for once he doesn't make me ask. "We've got thework up here. Dag's already moving. You go be where you're needed."
