Page 74 of Slander
"You want to move," she says. "To Tallahassee. With me."
"I want to move to Tallahassee with you." I hold her face. "I want to wake up an hour north of every person who decided what you were before they looked. I want you near your sister and near my mother, who is going to love you so hard you won't know what hit you. I want to build something with you in a place where the first thing anybody knows about Sophie Crockett isyou, not the lie." I press my forehead to hers. "You've never left it at all. Let's leave it together."
She's quiet, and I can feel her whole body deciding, an entire life of a single zip code arguing with the door swinging open in front of her.
"I've never lived anywhere else," she whispers. "I've never even imagined it. Not once, until Hannah said it, and now I can't stop."
"Then stop fighting it." I kiss her forehead, her cheek, the salt-track under her eye. "Come start over with me. Somewhere the sky stays up and nobody's waiting for you to fall."
She pulls back just far enough to look at me, and her eyes are wet.
"Okay," she says.
It comes out small and enormous at the same time.
"Okay?"
"Okay." A laugh breaks out of her, wet and astonished at herself. "Let's leave. Let's go to Tallahassee. Let's—God, Njal, let's get out of here!"
I kiss her then, the whole of it, the relief and the terror and the door swinging wide.
Outside the window, the same small town that tried to bury her sits in the dark, not knowing it already lost.
Not knowing the woman it called a monster is going to walk out clean, with her name back, her sister waiting, and a family that claimed her sight unseen.
This is the win the old me never knew existed, the one you can't get with your hands.
The only kind worth having.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Sophie
The retraction happens on a Friday, just a month after Njal sat me down at his kitchen table and gave me my own mind back.
It isn't a parade.
I don't know what I expected.
Some part of me wanted sirens, a marching band, the whole town dragged into the square to look at what they'd done.
What I get instead is a column on page two of the county paper, three hundred words that admit everything and apologize for nothing.
The kind a lawyer writes when a publication's terrified of getting sued worse than it already is.
Allegations against former Crockett Elementary teacher determined to be fabricated… digital forensic analysis… no credible evidence… the paper regrets…
I read it twice on Njal's porch with my coffee going cold.
I keep waiting for the big feeling, the one I've been owed for weeks.
It comes, but it isn't triumph. It's lower and stranger than that.
It's the sound a door makes clicking shut on a room I'm never going to have to stand in again.
"They printed it," I tell Njal when he comes out with his own cup and Hoagie shoving through the screen door ahead of him.
"Esperanza made them." He lowers himself onto the step beside me, knee bumping mine. "She had some of her own ready to go if they argued. They knew not to poke the bear." He bumps my shoulder. "How's it feel?"
