Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Njal
I don't sleep much, and what I get is thin.
It's the screenshots. They sit behind my eyes all night, those little gray and blue bubbles with her name stamped on top of a number that was never hers.
Somewhere around four in the morning I quit fighting my way past them and just let my brain do the thing it does, which is take a problem apart and lay the pieces out where I can see them.
By the time the light goes gray at the window, I've got most of it laid out.
I take my pills with two eggs I don't taste.
I go run before the heat gets too bad, and the whole three miles it doesn’t feel like I’m in my body at all.
I'm back in my kitchen, looking at those pages.
Because here's what I knew the second her face went still over that photo.
That's not gossip.
Gossip is loud, dumb, and it trips over itself.
Whatever's happening to Sophie isn't that.
She told me about the cold shoulders, the looks, the women who stop her after church with their hands on her arm to tell her they're praying.
That's the noise on top.
This is the thing underneath it.
This is fabricated texts on a spoofed number.
A real photo, cropped, time-stamped and captioned into a lie.
A letter written in the language of someone who knows exactly what a school board has to act on.
Three different tools. Used in the right order. Aimed at the one soft place that takes a person down quietest in a town like this.
Somebody wants to take her down, but why?
What is the motive here?
I've watched men build things like that.
Different stakes, different rooms, the same cold patience underneath.
You don't stumble into a campaign.
You plan it. You stage it.
You pick your timing—the first week of school, when she's got a room full of kids and nowhere to hide—and you let it run.
Knowing it doesn't make me hot. It makes me cold.
Cold, level, and wide awake.
There's a version of me that wants to find the hands that built those pages and take them apart knuckle by knuckle.
That version is real, and he's in here, and I can feel him stretching against the inside of my ribs.
I know what it costs to let him out.
I'm not letting him out. Not for this. For this there's a better tool than my hands.
For this, there's Dag, one of the members with the most seniority at the club.
I call him from the back porch at eight, after his coffee, before his day.
Dag's been a lawyer for going on thirty years, and my father's friend longer than that.
Did a couple of months alongside my father when they were both younger and dumber, came out, went to law school on pure spite, and never looked back.
He might be an attorney, but he'd put a body in the ground for my father without blinking. The only reason he never has is my father's never had to ask.
"Njal." He sounds pleased and wary at once, which is the right way to sound when a kid you watched grow up calls out of nowhere. "Your father know you're calling me?"
"Not yet."
"He will within the hour."
"I know it." That's how it works in my family. "I need you, Dag. Or I need to ask. You can say no."
"I can." The creak of him sitting down. "Won't, probably. But I can. Talk."
So I talk.
I lay it out flat, the way he taught me to lay things out flat when I was a kid in his office waiting on my father.
No editorializing. Facts in order. A woman. A schoolteacher. Fabricated texts on a number that isn't hers. A doctored photo. An anonymous letter that put her on unpaid leave inside a week.
No source. No evidence of any real conduct. Nothing true underneath any of it.
He's quiet when I finish. Then, gently, asking a thing he already half knows: "And what's this woman to you?"
"My neighbor."
"Njal."
"She's my neighbor, Dag." I watch the pines drip. "And she didn't do it, and somebody's burning her life down on purpose in this damn small ass town, and I'm not going to stand here and watch."
"Mm." He decides not to push. It's a kindness, and I take it. "Hang on. Let me get Esperanza."
A rustle. A muffled word. Then his wife's voice comes on, sharp and warm at once, the same voice that's been telling me what to do since I was a snarky teenager.
"Njal, mijo." Esperanza doesn’t do small talk before nine. "Dag gave me the run down. Fabricated digital evidence?"
"Screenshots and a photo. Looks real. She swears it's fake. I believe her."
"Of course it's fake." She says it like I've told her water is wet. "And here's the good news, and you tell her tonight so she sleeps. Fabricated evidence is brittle. It looks solid right up until somebody asks where it came from."
I lean against the porch rail and let her keep going because she's already moving, and I want to hear all of it.
"A real text has a carrier standing behind it. A real photo has a file standing behind it, with data baked in—when, where, what device made it. The people who build these things are betting nobody ever asks. In a town like that, nobody ever does."
"You ask."
"We ask." I can hear Dag come back on, the two of them passing it back and forth the way they've done my whole life. "We demand provenance. Chain of custody. The original files, the source device. We make that board produce what they don't have, and the whole thing falls apart in their hands."
The knot that's been pulled tight in my chest since I saw her on my porch in the rain loosens a degree.
"You'll take it."
"We'll take it." Dag again. "Have her gather everything. Every copy. The leave letter. Names of anybody who said a word to her face. Esperanza will want to meet her this week."
"She'll be at Meghan's new coffee place, probably. I'm getting her some work."
"Of course you are." No mockery in it. Just an old man hearing the whole story in four words. "We'll come to her, then. And you tell her she's not paying us, before she works herself up. This one's family."
I don't trust my voice for a second, so I let the second pass.
"Thank you," I say.
"Tell your mother I want her cornbread," Esperanza says, and the line goes dead before I can answer.
That's how this woman has ended every phone call of my life.
I text Meghan before I can talk myself out of it.
Me:
You still need hands at the new place? Paint, decorating?
Meghan:
Always. Bodul paints like a drunk toddler.
Me:
I know somebody. Hard worker. Needs the money, needs it quiet.
The dots come and go, come and go. I know what she's doing. She's reading the whole thing off the back of one sentence, the way she reads everything.
Meghan:
Bring them tomorrow. Nine o'clock.
I set the phone on the rail and stand there in the wet morning.
I do the thing the program taught me.
I look at what I'm feeling. I name it. I check it against the list—the lift, the racing, the part of me that thinks I'm untouchable.
Because here's the truth I'm not running from.
I've spent the goodwill of three of the most careful people in my life on a woman I've known less than a month.
Dag. Esperanza. Meghan. Hell, even some of my mother’s cooking.
A year ago, that kind of certainty about anything would've been the first warning.
The lift. The racing. The I know better than the meds feeling that ends with me on a locked ward.
I check it.
There's no lift to it. Nothing racing underneath. No voice telling me I'm chosen, special, or untouchable. It's as plain and solid as a fence post.
I'm just sure.
I've made a hundred reckless calls off a brain that lied to me, and I know exactly how those feel from the inside, and this isn't one of them.
This is the first time I've been this certain of anything while completely, boringly sane.
That should scare me more than it does.
She comes back over that evening, before I've even started a fire.
I hear her truck in her drive. Her screen door. Her feet crossing the grass between our houses, Hoagie ambling behind her like an afterthought.
When I open my door, she's standing in the last of the light with her arms crossed and her chin up, braced for me to have changed my mind overnight.
"You don't have to keep feeding me," she says. "I came to say thank you. And to find out if you were serious."
"Come in. I'll tell you what the lawyers said."
Her whole face moves on the word lawyers.
I sit her down at the table.
"Their names are Dag and Esperanza," I tell her. "Married. Both attorneys. Dag's known my father since before I was born."
"And they—what? They'd look at it?"
"They're taking it. Already said yes."
Her crossed arms don't move, but her thumb starts working at the inside of her elbow, fast, like she doesn't trust the ground yet. "Njal, lawyers cost?—"
"Esperanza told me what she thinks of the evidence.
" I lean forward, forearms on the table.
"She says fabricated stuff like that is brittle.
Looks solid right up until somebody asks it where it came from.
A real text's got a carrier behind it. A real photo's got a file behind it, with the where and the when and the what-device baked right in.
" I watch her chin lift, a fraction. "Whoever made yours is betting nobody ever asks.
She's going to ask. She's going to make that school board hand over what they don't have, and it falls apart in their hands. "
She goes very still.
I watch her take the first full breath I've seen her take since she came through my door in the rain.
It goes all the way down. Her shoulders come off her ears. Her arms slide loose from around herself and her hands settle flat on the table, and she looks down at them like they belong to somebody who isn't drowning anymore.
"It can come apart," she says, quiet, testing the words like a step on bad ice.
"It can come apart."
"And they want everything you've got," I finish. "Esperanza wants to meet you this week. And she said to tell you you're not paying them, so don't start up about it."
"I can't just?—"
"She said no." My mouth tugs at the corner. "I'd listen to her. I've never once won an argument with that woman."
Sophie laughs. It cracks halfway into something wetter, and she presses the back of her wrist to her mouth and breathes.