Chapter 12
Chapter Twelve
Haley arrived on Monday with takeout and a folder of screenshots, still wearing the lanyard from her office.
Sophie saw the folder and nearly closed the door, but Haley caught it with her foot and held up the food.
She had forty minutes before she needed to collect her niece from a dance class, and the noodles were already cooling.
“Eat first,” Haley said. She looked past Sophie toward the stairs. “Kelly home?”
“Working late,” Sophie said. She stepped aside. “What did Lorraine do now?”
Haley set out two cartons and a packet of chopsticks with a care that made Sophie want to sweep everything onto the floor.
“She’s telling people you took money,” Haley said. She slid one screenshot across the table. “Denise sent this to Jesse. Bethany sent me the others.”
Sophie read the message twice. Lorraine had described her as angry and impulsive, said Jesse was too ashamed to admit what had happened, and asked Denise to keep an eye on him at work. The concern sounded almost tender until Sophie reached the sentence about their savings.
“He answered,” Haley said. She put a second page beside the first. “He told Denise it wasn’t true.”
“Just Denise?” Haley’s expression supplied the rest.
Sophie pushed the food away. She opened her laptop, found Lorraine’s post about the wedding, and began typing beneath it. After two lines she lost track of what she meant to say and started again, her hands shaking so badly that she kept hitting the wrong keys.
Haley moved her carton out of the way. “Let me read it before you send it,” she said. “Please.”
“Now you’re careful,” Sophie said, and watched the color leave Haley’s face.
“Yes,” Haley said. She put the chopsticks down. “I am now.”
Sophie looked back at the screen, where she’d written wedding three times in one sentence. She shut the laptop hard enough to make the chopsticks jump.
“I told you to leave her alone,” she said. “You heard me.”
“I know I did.” Haley sat. “I’ve said I’m sorry.”
“You said you could have tried harder. You looked pleased with yourself.”
Haley picked up her chopsticks again. One had a splinter sticking out, but she used them anyway.
“I saw her do it again,” she said. “Pull him away from you. Like you were standing there waiting for permission to have your own husband.”
“Did you think I’d thank you?”
“A little, yes.” Haley sounded angry now. “I thought we’d laugh about it when she’d gone home and put the other damn dress on. You were smiling too.”
“I laughed for about a second,” she said. “Then I spent my wedding night arguing about you.”
Haley pushed back from the table. “He chose to do that,” she said. Her voice had become sharp. “I’m sorry I made a mess. I’m not going to take the blame for what he did afterward.”
“I know whose fault it was.” Sophie pulled the noodles toward her and couldn’t get the lid off without bending it.
Haley’s phone rang against the table. She answered her sister, promised she was leaving, and gathered the screenshots into their folder while the voice on the other end grew louder.
Sophie held the carton out to her when she hung up. Haley freed the lid with one angry tug and put it down so hard that sauce splashed onto Kelly’s tablecloth.
“I’ve got five minutes,” Haley said. She blotted the sauce with a napkin. “Show me what you wrote.”
After a while Sophie turned the laptop around. She had deleted the comment and started a post of her own, using the original picture of the sage dress and Lorraine’s wedding photograph. The doorbell clip waited in another window.
“I’m putting it up,” she said. “You can tell me if I get something wrong.”
Haley read slowly. She asked Sophie to remove a screenshot sent by a cousin who hadn’t agreed to be named, then pointed out that Jesse had been present for the offers to help Lorraine stay. Sophie added that detail and felt a sharp pleasure as she did it.
The post was shorter after they worked on it.
Sophie denied arranging the spill, admitted she had not felt sorry for Lorraine in the moment, and described the offers of a wrap, a private room, and a change of dress.
She included the message about the green gown and the footage of Lorraine using a key after Jesse had promised to take it away.
She stated plainly that she had taken none of Jesse’s money.
She kept the bedroom details brief. Even so, she sat for several minutes with her finger beside the button, picturing people reading about the drawer while she slept in Kelly’s spare room. Then she thought of Denise being asked to watch over the husband she had supposedly robbed.
Haley stood beside her. “Do you want another minute?” she asked.
“No,” Sophie said. She clicked before she could change her mind. “It’s up.”
Bethany confirmed that Hank had offered to get another dress. Ruth asked whether family matters needed to be discussed this way, and Sophie typed that Ruth had seemed happy enough discussing her bank account.
Haley read over her shoulder. “That one’s going to ring you,” she said, and Sophie pressed send before she could object.
Kelly came home as Haley was leaving. Sophie hugged her friend in the hall, holding on after Haley began to move away.
“I’m still mad at you,” Sophie said. Her mouth was against Haley’s shoulder, and the admission came out muffled.
“I know,” Haley said. Her phone started ringing in her bag again, and she swore against Sophie’s shoulder. “I’ll call tomorrow. I’ve got to go before my sister murders me.”
After Haley left, Sophie took a screenshot of the replies confirming what had happened at the reception.
She added it beneath the photographs so nobody could claim she’d invented the offers of help.
Bethany’s name and the little picture beside it made the account look less like one angry woman talking to herself, and Sophie checked twice to make sure the addition was visible.
The post had been shared outside its intended audience by morning.
A woman Sophie barely remembered from school sent sympathy and asked whether Jesse’s mother had always been inappropriate with him.
Someone else offered the name of a divorce lawyer and added three laughing faces beneath Lorraine’s photograph.
Sophie deleted the comment with the laughing faces. The woman wrote again to ask what she’d done wrong, and Sophie closed the app.
Bethany called while Sophie was looking for her work shoes. She put her on speaker and knelt beside the guest bed, where one shoe had disappeared beneath the valance.
“Can you take the screenshot of my comment down?” Bethany asked. There was a child crying near the phone. “The photo beside my name has him in it. Someone’s put it on another page.”
“You wrote it under the post.” Sophie reached farther under the bed. “I didn’t put him anywhere.”
“I’m asking if you can take that picture out.” Bethany moved away from the crying, and Sophie heard a door close. “I’ve had a woman messaging me about letting him near Lorraine. I don’t even know her.”
Sophie sat back on her heels. She could see the heel of the missing shoe now, wedged against a box, and the effort of reaching for it suddenly seemed more than she could manage.
“Everybody wanted me to prove it. I finally do, and now everybody wants it gone.” Behind Bethany’s door, the child was still crying.
“I’m asking you to take my son’s picture out,” Bethany said. “That’s all.” The child began shouting, and she told him she’d be there in a minute.
Sophie found the image and removed it, then sent Bethany a screenshot of the edited post. The photograph of Lorraine’s green dress stayed, along with Sophie’s own evidence. She had to answer two messages asking why she’d changed it before she’d even found her other shoe.
Bethany sent a thank-you as Sophie was putting on her coat. Beneath it was a photograph of the child wearing his father’s shoes. Sophie enlarged the picture, then closed it without answering.
At the museum, a colleague stopped beside her desk with a face full of concern. She said she had seen the post through a mutual friend, then asked whether Sophie needed someone to walk her to her car.
“Why?” Sophie asked. She was holding the proposal for the east gallery against her chest.
“I just meant with everything happening,” the woman said. She lowered her voice. “With him.”
Sophie looked toward the corridor, where two volunteers were hanging their coats. “Jesse isn’t going to hurt me,” she said, too loudly, and both women turned.
Her colleague apologized. Sophie thanked her for asking and went into the meeting room, where she’d left the gallery proposal beside the wrong chair. The director came in while she was moving it and asked whether they should do this another day.
“Today,” Sophie said. She put the folder beside his and sat down. “I’ve got a teacher waiting for an answer.”
The decision took forty minutes. Sophie left with six Tuesday afternoons, conditional on finding transport and clearing the room for evening events.
She’d promised the teacher Fridays before checking a reception she had booked herself, and the director kept turning the calendar toward her initials whenever she tried another argument.
The teacher answered from a noisy corridor. Sophie apologized for changing the day; the woman said she’d already persuaded a colleague to swap lunch duty and would have to ask again. Her weariness was harder to hear than anger would have been.
Sophie worked late revising the costs. The classroom photograph the teacher had sent remained open behind the figures: children squeezed around desks, a drying rack balanced on a cupboard, one boy grinning at the camera with a paper crown slipping over his eyes.
She had wanted to show them the new room before Christmas.
Now she would be fortunate to have the buses arranged for January.
Her phone rang in her hand. Ruth’s name appeared, and Sophie let it ring until the call ended.
The message that followed said Ruth had removed her earlier comment. It also said she had repeated what Lorraine told her because she had no reason to disbelieve her own sister. Sophie read it, set the phone down, and began writing to the bus company.
Jesse emailed that evening. He said he had called two relatives about the money and was working through the others. At the end he asked whether she could take down a comment calling him sick.
Sophie found it beneath a reply from someone she did not know. She deleted it, blocked the stranger, and wrote back that the post itself was staying.
His answer arrived while she was brushing her teeth.
I know. I wasn’t asking you to take it down.
She opened the post again in bed. Jesse’s name had been tagged beneath a joke she didn’t understand, and when she followed it to another page she found strangers discussing what he must have done to her.
She deleted the tag, put the phone beneath the spare pillow, and lay awake long after the screen had gone dark.