Chapter 3
CHAPTER THREE
Sophie
Karen has a folder on her desk with my name on the tab, and she keeps her hand flat on top of it the whole time she's talking, like she's afraid of what'll happen if she lets me see what’s inside.
"I need you to know I'm on your side here," she says. "I want that said first, before anything else."
I'm sitting in the chair across from her with my hands folded in my lap the way I was taught to fold them, and I can feel my pulse going in my throat. "Okay."
"A letter came in to the board on Friday afternoon." She pauses. Her thumb moves back and forth across the folder's edge. "It makes some allegations about you. About your conduct."
"My conduct?"
"With a minor."
The words don't hit me all at once.
They come in pieces, the way a burn does—first the contact, then the heat a half second behind it.
"That's not—" My mouth has gone dry. I swallow and start over. "Karen, that's not true. Whatever it says, it's not true. I would never—you know me."
"I do know you." She says it fast, and she means it, and it doesn't help as much as it should. "Sophie, I’ve known you since you were a student-teacher in this building. If it were up to me, this letter would already be in the shredder."
"Then shred it."
"I can't." Her hand presses flatter on the folder. "It didn't come in alone. There were attachments."
The floor goes unsteady under the chair and settles.
"What sort of attachments?"
She doesn't answer right away, and that's its own answer.
"Karen. What attachments?"
"Screenshots." She won't quite look at me when she says it. "I'm not allowed to show them to you, not while it's under review. But there are screenshots, Sophie. Messages. They look like they came from you."
I sit there.
I'm trying to think of a single message I've ever sent that could be cut and turned and made to look like the thing she's not saying out loud, and there isn't one, because I haven't sent one, because there's nothing to find.
And that's when the cold comes up through me, slow, from the soles of my feet.
There's nothing to find.
Which means somebody made it.
Somebody sat down and built a thing that looks like me out of pieces that aren't me, and printed it, and mailed it to the people who decide whether I get to keep doing the only work I've ever wanted to do.
Somebody did that on purpose, with their hands, in the quiet, while I was grading spelling tests and lighting fires in my backyard and thinking the worst of it was a cold shoulder in the dairy aisle.
Goodness gracious, they probably used AI to do it, too. All of that stuff looks so real these days.
"How long," I manage.
"The review? I don't know yet. These things take time."
"Am I—do I still teach? Tomorrow? Do I?—"
"You teach tomorrow." She softens, finally, now that she has something true to give me. "Nobody's pulling you out of that classroom on an anonymous letter, attachments or not. We follow the process. The process protects you too, honey. That's the part to hold on to."
I nod, because she needs me to, and I stand up, because if I stay in this chair one more minute I'm going to cry in front of her and I don’t want to do that.
"Sophie." She catches me at the door. "Who would do this to you?"
I look at her, and I think about Lizzie Sue's hand on my forearm, and Beverly's hand on the small of my back, and Reverend Hardin building his sermon joint by joint with my name nowhere in it and everywhere in it at once.
"I don't know," I tell her.
All I do know is someone has me in their crosshairs, and I don’t know why.
* * *
I make it to my car before my hands start shaking, and I sit in the school parking lot with the engine off and let them.
The lot empties out around me.
Buses pull away in a line, brakes hissing, and the last of the car-riders get folded into back seats by parents who don't know yet, or maybe do.
Regardless, everyone will know soon. That’s how everything is when you live in a small town.
I watch them go and I keep both hands on the wheel like the car's still moving, because if I let go I don't know what they'll do.
I want to call my father.
I get as far as his name on the screen, my thumb hovering over it, and I stop.
Because if I call him and tell him, he'll have to tell me whether he already knew.
Whether the board talked to the deacons. Whether my own father has been sitting in a room with these people, hearing my name turned into a warning, and saying—what? Something? Nothing?
I picture him at the long table in the church annex, the one with the water rings and the box of tissues somebody always brings.
I picture Reverend Hardin at the head of it with his hands folded, sorrowful, careful. I picture my father not standing up.
I don't know which answer would be worse, and I'm not strong enough today to find out.
I put the phone face down on the passenger seat and drive home with the radio off.
By the time the light goes orange, I've changed into the soft pajama shorts and the threadbare tank I’m going to sleep in tonight.
I've got a fire going and a glass of wine I've half drunk before I've even sat down, which isn't like me, and tonight I couldn’t care less.
Hoagie sprawls across my feet with a groan like an old man.
"You don't know how good you've got it," I tell him.
He thumps his tail once and doesn't open his eyes.
The fire pops. The katydids are going in the pines, and the heat of the day is finally breaking into something I can breathe, and I sit there with my wine, trying to mellow out.
It doesn't work tonight. The folder's too close.
Screenshots. Messages. They look like they came from you.
I keep turning it over, looking for the loose thread, and there isn't one, because you can't pull a thread out of a thing that was sewn shut by somebody who wanted you to drown.
All of the attachments have been created to be used against me. I know that. Karen knows it too, but how in the heck am I going to prove that?
Hoagie's head comes up.
"What?" I say.
He's looking at the gap in the fence, the one my father keeps meaning to fix, the one where the boards have pulled apart just wide enough.
"Hoagie. No."
He's gone before the word's all the way out, seventy pounds of him squeezing through a gap that should not fit him, and then his tags are jingling away into the dark on the other side, toward the rental that's had its lights on all week.
"Hoagie." I'm up and out of the chair, wine abandoned in the grass. "Hoagie, come. Come!"
Nothing. Of course nothing. He has never once come when called in eight years and he's not going to start tonight, when I look like I've been crying and I'm in my pajamas that aren’t appropriate for company.
I go through the gate because I'm too tired to fold myself through the gap, and come around the tree line calling his name in the loud whisper you use when you don't want the whole road to hear you, and I stop.
Because he's found the neighbor.
There's a porch on the back of the rental, and a single light burning low above the door, and under it my dog is sitting at the feet of the biggest man I have ever seen up close, like he's been doing it his whole life.
The man is sitting very still in a wooden chair. He's got a hand down, resting on Hoagie's head, not scratching, just resting it there, and Hoagie has his eyes half closed and his whole traitorous body leaned into the man's leg.
I see the bike first, really see it, parked off to the side of the drive where the silhouette came from the night I watched the window for too long.
Black and heavy. Serious in a way the trucks outside the church aren't.
And I see the man, and everything my mother ever taught me about men like this stands up at once in the back of my mind and starts talking.
"He's friendly," I say, which is the wrong first thing, but it's the thing that comes out. "I'm so sorry. He does this. He goes through the fence."
The man looks at me. He doesn't get up fast, doesn't apologize over me, doesn't fill the air.
He just looks, and there's nothing in it that makes me want to step back, which surprises me, because most things this week have made me want to step back.
"He's all right." His voice is low and even. "He's been keeping me company."
"He has a real talent for finding the one person who didn't invite him."
The corner of the man's mouth moves. Not a smile, yet.
He stands, and it's a whole event, the standing—he just keeps going up—and Hoagie scrambles to his feet beside him, delighted, like the two of them have plans now.
The man bends and hooks two fingers under Hoagie's collar, gentle, and walks him to the edge of the porch toward me, and I get a look at his hands in the porch light.
They're scarred. The knuckles especially, white lines over them, the kind of marks you don't get from anything good. One of them's been broken before and healed a little crooked.
I notice them and then I notice I've noticed them, and I make myself look back up at his face.
"I can walk him to the gap," the man says. "Or you can. He's your dog."
"Right now, that’s debatable."
This time he does smile.
I don't know why I do it, but my words come flying out. "I've got a fire going. And most of a bottle of wine I'm not going to finish by myself. If you want a glass. For catching him."
He considers it. He actually considers it, like it's a real question and not just a thing people say, and I appreciate that more than I can account for.
"Yeah," he says. "All right."
He follows me back across his yard and through the gate, and the dog trots between us like he's been hosting this party all along.
He sits across the fire from me in the second Adirondack chair, the one nobody ever uses, and Hoagie collapses between us like he's brokered peace.
I pour him a glass and hand it across. Our fingers come close but don't touch, and my face goes warm for no reason I'd admit to out loud.
He takes a sip. A small one. Sets the glass on the arm of the chair and mostly leaves it there.
We don't talk much at first, and the strange thing is it doesn't itch.
All week people have been talking at me, full to the brim with concern, every sentence a hook with something on the end of it.
This man says nothing and asks nothing, and for the first time in days, my shoulders come down out of my ears.
"You moved in," I say finally. "The rental's been empty since spring."
"Couple weeks ago."
"Just you?"
"Just me."
The fire works at a knot of pine and spits a spark toward the dark. He watches it go.
My eyes keep going to the thing folded over his shoulders—leather, heavy, with a patch stitched into it.
I've seen vests like it on men at gas stations off the interstate, the kind of men my mother would steer me away from with a hand on my elbow.
"What’s on your vest?" I ask, and nod at it.
Something flickers across his face—not offense, more like he's heard it before and decided a long time ago not to mind it.
"It's a cut," he says.
"A cut." I turn the word over, and the fire pops between us like it's weighing in.
"Vest is what they're called by people who don't wear them, or people who don’t know any better." He reaches back and touches it, just rests two fingers on the leather the way he rested his hand on my dog. "This is a cut. There's a difference."
"In what?"
"A club." He watches me when he says it, like he's gauging which way I'll jump. "Motorcycle club. Out of Tallahassee. My family's in it. My father. My brother—my twin. Cousins. Most of the men I grew up with." A pause. "It's a thing you're born into, in my case."
I think about that.
Everything I know about motorcycle clubs I learned from the news, watching Sons of Anarchy when I was far too young for it, and from my mother's warnings and from one documentary I half watched.
None of it fits the man sitting across from me being gentle with my idiot dog and declining to drink the wine I poured him.
"I don't know what to say to that," I tell him, honestly.
"Most people don't." He doesn't seem bothered. "Most people say something anyway. You didn't. That's all right."
"Should I be—" I stop. I don't know how to finish it without it being rude.
"Scared?" he offers.
"I was going to find a nicer word."
"Don't bother on my account." He looks at me across the fire, and the light moves on his face, and there's something in his eyes that isn't hard, that's the opposite of hard, that's tired in a way I recognize because I see it in my own mirror.
"You're sitting in your own yard with your own dog and a fence you can get back through in about four steps. You're fine."
And the thing is—I believe him. I don't know why I believe him.
My mother would have me up and inside with the deadbolt thrown. But I believe him, and I stay.
The fire ticks down. Hoagie sighs in his sleep and rolls so his spine is against the man's boot, shameless.
"What do you do?" the man asks. "Out here. When you're not feeding stray men your wine."
I take a slow sip so I don't have to answer right away.
It would be the easiest thing in the world to tell him. I'm a teacher. Second grade. I've got twenty-one kids in my class, twenty-two until last week.
The words sit right there. And right behind them sits the rest of it—the folder with my name on it, the screenshots that aren't real, the woman at the Piggly Wiggly weighing the word sister in her mouth—and I can't say the first part without the second part coming with it.
Not tonight. Not to the one person within a mile of me who looks at me and sees a woman with a dog, and not a story the town's already decided how to tell.
"This and that," I say.
He doesn't push. He just nods like that's a real answer, and turns his glass a quarter turn on the arm of the chair, and lets it be.
I could kiss him for not pushing. I think that, exactly that, and then I have to look at the fire for a second.
We sit there while it burns down, not saying much, and it's the most peace I've had since Karen spoke to me earlier about the investigation.
The fire's gone to coals by the time he stands to leave.
"Thank you," I say. "For the dog. And for the—" I gesture vaguely at the dark, the chairs, the hour. "For not making me talk."
"Anytime." He says it like he means it, not like the word people use to end a conversation.
He ducks back through the gap into his own yard, Hoagie watching him go like he's losing a friend, and I gather up the glasses and head for my back door.
I'm halfway across the grass when it hits me, and I stop, and I almost laugh.
I never got his name.
I sat by a fire for an hour with a man who told me his whole family rides with a motorcycle club out of Tallahassee, and I never asked him his name.
I look back through the pines. His porch light's still on. The big shape of him is moving through it, and then the light goes out.
I go inside. I throw the deadbolt, the way my mother would want.
But I'm thinking about the man next door, his cut, and his crooked, scarred hands—and I'm not thinking about the folder with my name on it, not right now, not for the first time all day.
Maybe this new, hot neighbor is just the distraction I need.