I don't have a plan.
I don't have the dog as an excuse, or a bottle of wine to offer, or any reason on earth to be standing on this man's porchexcept that his is the only door in this whole town I can knock on without watching a verdict land on somebody's face.
He looks at me like I’m a person—not the deacon’s daughter, not Hannah’s sister, not the school teacher with a scandal.
I'm soaked through before I reach the steps.
The porch light comes on before I lift my hand to knock.
The door opens and he fills it, and he takes one look at me—drowned, shaking, the papers clutched to my chest under my crossed arms like they're the only thing holding me upright—and he doesn't ask me a single question.
"Come in here." Njal steps back and holds the door wide. "Get out of that damn storm."
He drapes a towel over my shoulders and puts another in my hands, and he doesn't say a word while I stand dripping on his floor and try to remember how to breathe.
He doesn't ask what happened. He doesn't tell me it'll be all right.
He just moves around the little kitchen in that unhurried way he has, like nothing in the world needs to happen faster than it's already happening.
He sets a pan on the stove and lights the burner.
A minute later the smell of it reaches me—tomatoes, garlic, something my own mother would've called a casserole and been proud of.
"It's my mother's." He catches me looking and tips his chin toward the stove. "She left enough to feed a crew. Sit before you fall down."
I sit. My hands won't quit shaking, so I press them flat to the table to make them stop.
He sets a plate in front of me, then a glass of ice water, then a fork, and he leans back against the counter with his own plate and gives me room to either eat or not.
I eat.
I don't mean to. I'd have sworn I wasn't hungry.
Then there's a forkful in my mouth, and it's warm, and it's so good.
My eyes sting at the simple kindness of it.
"This is incredible." My voice cracks straight down the middle. "Truly."
"My mom owns a catering company." Something goes soft under his voice when he talks about her. "Been feeding people her whole life. It's how she says the things she can't say out loud."
I look down at my plate so he won't catch what my face is doing. "Your mother sounds like a good woman."
"She is."
I eat a little more, and the shaking loosens its grip, and the storm hurls itself against the windows while his kitchen stays warm and dry and lit.
For the length of a meal, I'm not the woman from the parking lot.
Then he pulls out the chair across from me and sits carefully, forearms on the table. "You want to tell me," he asks, "or you want to just sit a while?"
And I don't know why I do what I do next.
I'll turn it over later, the way I turn everything over later—that I've known this man for two conversations and a glass of wine, that my mother raised me never to air the family's trouble in front of a stranger, that I don't even know his last name.
But right now, he's the only soul in a hundred miles who looked at me today and didn't already decide what I am.
So I slide the damp stack of papers across the table to him. "I'd rather show you."