Chapter 13 #2
"And third." He steps in close and takes my face in both his hands, and his thumbs catch the wet on my cheeks.
"You are not a monster, and you don't get to talk about the woman I claimed that way.
That's mine to defend now, you understand?
The whole list of who you are. And I'm not handing one inch of it back to a school board, a Facebook post, your daddy, or you on your worst night. So don't ask me to."
I press my face into his palm and I cry, ugly and exhausted, all the stress finally breaking through.
He holds my face, and lets me ruin myself against his hands, and doesn't once let go.
* * *
Later, in the dark, when I've cried myself down to the hiccupping quiet and we're lying tangled in his bed with Hoagie, I say what's underneath all the rest of it.
"I don't know how to let people stay," I tell his collarbone.
"I've never had it. Everyone who was supposed to love me had conditions on it.
And I keep trying to push you away before you can leave, because at least if I do it first, it won't be a surprise.
I know that's what I'm doing. I just don't know how to stop. "
His arm tightens around me.
"You don't have to know how," he says. "You just have to not get your way. And lucky for you, I'm stubborn as a fence post and got nowhere else to be."
A laugh comes out of me, wet and surprised. He kisses the top of my head, and for a minute the world is small and warm and survivable.
But I lie awake after he's asleep, listening to him breathe, and the thought won't leave me alone—that there's a whole life out there past this town, past these people who decided what I was before they ever looked, and I have never once let myself imagine walking toward it.
I call Hannah in the morning, on the porch, while Njal's still asleep.
She picks up on the second ring like she's been waiting, and the second I hear her voice—steady, the voice of a woman who learned the hard way how to keep herself level-minded, I start to cry again.
"They fired me, Han."
"I heard." Her voice doesn't crack, but something moves under it. "Carol Whitfield's been keeping Mama updated, and Mama can't help herself, she called me. I'm so sorry, Soph. I'm so sorry they did this to you."
"How did you survive it?" It comes out raw, not really a question. "When they all turned on you. When Mama and Daddy looked at you like you were… when they prayed over you instead of helping you. How did you live through people deciding you were broken when you knew you weren't?"
The line is quiet for a moment.
"I didn't, at first," Hannah says. "You were too young to see most of it, and I'm glad.
I went somewhere pretty dark for a while, thinking if everybody who was supposed to love me saw a monster, maybe they were right and I was the one who couldn't see straight.
" She breathes. "And then one day, I figured out the only opinion of me that was going to keep me alive was my own.
So I stopped waiting for them to give me back to myself.
I left. I got my own apartment and my own job and my own doctor, and I built a life full of people who met me as I am instead of the story somebody told about me. "
"Was it lonely?"
"For a while. And then it wasn't because I let the right ones in." A pause. "Soph. Can I ask you something? This man. The biker. Is he one of the right ones? Mama told me a little bit."
I think about him asleep in the bed behind me, the man who shut off the kitchen faucet and told me I didn't get to call his woman a monster.
"Yeah," I say, and it comes out certain in a way almost nothing has lately. "He really is."
"Good." Hannah lets out a breath. "Because I've been scared for you, you know.
Not scared you'd break—you're tougher than I ever was, you always were.
Scared you'd do what I almost did. Decide the story was true because enough people told it.
I spent two years believing I was the broken thing in our family because that's what the prayers were for, fixing the broken thing, and it took me a long time to understand the prayers were the broken thing, and I was fine the whole time.
" Her voice steadies. "You're not guilty.
Whatever the town decided, whatever Daddy texted you—ignore it. "
"I'm trying."
"I know you are. And here's what I know, baby sister, from the far side of everything you're walking through.
" Her voice goes low and fierce. "You don't owe that town your future.
You don't owe Mama and Daddy a single thing, not your forgiveness and not your forever.
You get to leave. You get to pick a place where nobody knows the story and build a whole new one.
I did it an hour up the road and you could too, and Lord, Sophie—you could be near me again. "
The wasp from yesterday is back, working the same stretch of railing.
I watch it and feel something crack open in my chest that's been sealed shut my whole life.
"Tallahassee," I say.
"Tallahassee," Hannah says, and I can hear her smiling through the worst week of my life.
"Just saying. There's a whole world up here, and it's only an hour from a town that doesn't deserve you, and your sister's in it.
Apparently so is a whole motorcycle club that your boyfriend is part of.
" She laughs softly. "Think about it. That's all I'm saying. Think about getting out."
After we hang up, I sit on the porch for a long time with the phone warm in my hand.
The morning comes up gold over a yard I'm renting in a town that threw eggs at me.
For the first time, I let myself think about the possibility.
I could leave.
It doesn't feel like I’d be running.
It feels like the first door anybody's ever shown me that opens instead of locking.