Chapter 12 #2
"You didn't ask me." She's somewhere between outrage and something else, something coming up warm under the outrage, and I'd bet my bike on which one wins.
"You don't get to just—decide a person. There's supposed to be a—a conversation.
A nice dinner. Somebody's supposed to say will you be my girlfriend like a normal human, not announce I've been claimed like a flag planted on the moon. "
"You want me to ask you?"
"I want—" She huffs, and there it is, the warm thing breaking through, fighting her mouth into almost-a-smile.
"I don't know what I want. I want this to be a normal thing that normal people do.
And instead, I've got a biker telling me I've been claimed, and his daddy adopting me sight unseen, and apparently a whole motorcycle club that considers me theirs now, and I'm—Njal, I'm a second-grade teacher. I drive a truck. I have a hound dog."
"I know what you have." I reach over and take the hand that's been worrying that cup all break.
"I've been paying attention. And I'm telling you what I am, which is yours, and what you are, which is claimed, and what that means, which is your rent is the smallest problem you've got, and you can let me take it off the pile. "
She looks down at my hand around hers.
"You really would just pay it," she says, quieter now. "Like it's nothing."
"It's not nothing. It's for you." I run my thumb over her knuckles. "Which makes it the easiest money I'll ever spend."
She's quiet a long moment, and when she looks up, her eyes are wet in a way that's got nothing to do with rent.
"My whole life I've belonged to people who were ashamed of me the second I stopped being convenient," she says. "My father. The church. They claimed me right up until claiming me cost them something, and then they set me down on the curb."
Her voice wavers and holds. "And you're sitting here, in a coffee shop office, telling me your family decided I'm theirs before they met me.
That a whole club's got my back over a woman they've never laid eyes on.
I don't—Njal, I don't know how to handle that.
I don't have any words for it. The only thing I've ever known is the kind that leaves. "
"Then let me teach you the other kind." I bring her hand up between both of mine. "The kind that doesn't. We've got time. You can learn it slowly."
She wipes her face with the back of her free hand and laughs, wet and embarrassed, and lets me hold on.
"For the record," she says finally, and the smile's all the way out now, wobbly and real, "this is the worst proposal-of-anything I've ever heard. You skipped about nine steps. There was no dinner. You compared me to library property."
"Noted."
"And I'm still mad you didn't ask."
"Then ask me back." I shrug. "Even it up. Go on."
She narrows her eyes at me. Sets her jaw. And says, with all the wrecked dignity she's got left after the week she's had: "Njal, will you be my—" She falters, because none of the words fit what this is. "Mine?"
"Yeah," I tell her. "I will. Already am."
"Then I guess you can pay my rent." She says it like she's doing me a favor, and I let her have that too. "But I'm paying you back. Every cent. When this is over, and I'm working again."
"You won't, but okay."
"I will."
"You won't." I bring her knuckles to my mouth. "But I love that you think you will."
We close out the shift a little after four, and Meghan sends us off with a bag of day-old pastries and a look at me that says I'd better take care of her, because the women in this family communicate entirely in looks and baked goods.
In the truck, before I turn the key, my phone buzzes.
It's not Sophie this time.
It's Dag, and the message is short, the way Dag's messages always are when something's actually moving.
Dag: Esperanza filed this morning. Demand for production—every original file, device, account, the whole chain behind those images.
They've got thirty days. They don't have it, Njal.
Nobody fabricates this clean and keeps the receipts lying around.
When they can't produce, the whole thing starts to come down, and we start finding out who built it.
I read it twice.
I don't say anything out loud, because Sophie's had enough today, and the part of this that's a hunt is mine and the table's, not hers.
She's spent two days getting hit.
She doesn't need to know yet that I've started, in the back of my head, building a list—who'd have the money, who'd have the reach, who'd have the reason to spend real resources burning down a second-grade teacher in a town this size.
Because Dag's right. This is too clean.
Somebody paid for this, or knew how to do it for free, and either way it means somebody wanted Sophie Crockett gone bad enough to learn how to do all this.
No one spends that kind of effort on nothing.
There's a reason under this, buried somewhere, and I'm going to know it before this is done.
I think about the work itself, the way Runes described it—good, ugly, made by somebody who knew exactly which soft place to aim for.
You don't aim that carefully at a stranger.
You aim that carefully when you've studied a person, or when you've studied what destroying them gets you.
A second-grade teacher with a hound dog, a truck, and a daddy who preaches doesn't have an enemy with those kinds of resources. Not on her own.
Which means the resources came for a reason that's bigger than her, and she's standing in the middle of it without knowing why.
Somewhere, there's someone who built a monster out of a good woman and went to bed satisfied.
I'm going to find that person.
And when I do, I'm going to hand them to Dag and Esperanza and a courtroom instead of doing what the old me would've done.
The fact that I can feel both urges in me right now—the cold patient one and the hot stupid one—and reach for the cold one on purpose, that's the whole point of how far I've come.
"What is it?" Sophie's watching me. "Your face went somewhere."
"Dag." I pocket the phone and turn the key. "Esperanza filed. The clock's running on the school board now. It's good news, Soph. It's the first real good news of the week."
It's not a lie. It's the true part, the part she needs.
The other part—the cold part, the part where I'm already hunting—that one stays private a while longer.
I pull us out of the lot and point us toward home, and beside me, she leans her head back against the seat and closes her eyes, claimed and fed and one good shift lighter.
I drive us into the falling evening with a list forming in the dark behind my eyes and her hand resting loose on my thigh.
I'll get them.