Words I never typed, lined up to sound like a woman doing the exact thing they're accusing me of—friendly at first, then familiar, then something that turns my stomach to read, because a stranger built it to.
My thumb goes numb scrolling the pages.
There's a photo, too.
Me, outside Hooley's, the bar out on the county road, from back in the spring when Dana got engaged and a whole crowd of us went.
Except in this one I'm cropped down close, and the time stamp's been changed to a school night, and underneath somebody's written a caption that turns a goodbye hug into something filthy.
I know I never sent those messages.
I wastherefor every single day of my own life—grading papers, feeding my dog, and sitting in my pew—and I never once did the thing this says I did.
But I can't prove a word of it.
That's what finally breaks me, alone in the school parking lot with the rain coming down.
Not the leave. Not the keys.
It's the understanding that I could stand up in front of this whole town and tell the truth with my hand on my grandmother's Bible, and it would sound exactly—exactly—like what a guilty woman would say.
Somebody made this.
Somebody sat at a computer and built a version of me that doesn't exist, probably with one of those programs that can make anything look real now, and there's no expert at a county school board who's going to take it apart.
They'll glance at it. They'll see my name. They'll decide.
The rain comes down harder.
I should call my father.
The thought arrives the way it always does, automatic, a reflex worn smooth by twenty-six years—something's wrong, call Daddy.
My thumb's already moving to his name before the rest of me catches up.
Then I stop.
Because he's a deacon, and the deacons have met about this.
They find everything out just before the town does.
I know it the way I know the rest of it, deep and certain and without a shred of proof.
If I call him, he'll have already heard.
He'll have already sat in a room while a man like Reverend Hardin, folded his hands and looked sorrowful, and I don't know what my father did in that room.
I don't know if he stood up for me.
And I'm not strong enough today to find out that he didn't.
I set the phone face down on the passenger seat.
I don't decide to drive to him—to Njal.
I just turn the key, and the wheel, and go.
By the time I reach the dirt road, the storm's full-on, the real kind, warm and mean, lightning walking somewhere out past the pines and the rain so heavy my wipers can't get ahead of it.