"I can't just?—"
"She said no." My mouth tugs at the corner. "I'd listen to her. I've never once won an argument with that woman."
Sophie laughs. It cracks halfway into something wetter, and she presses the back of her wrist to her mouth and breathes.
"Why?" she asks when she's got hold of herself. "Njal. Why are you doing all of this? You don't know me. I keep waiting forthe part where it costs something. Where there's a price. And I can't find it, and that scares me worse than if there was one."
There it is.
The worst thing in her life, slid across this same table last night, because I was the only one who hadn't already decided what she was.
She gave me hers. It isn't right to keep mine in my pocket.
"There's no price," I tell her. "But I'll give you something, so it's even between us."
She goes still and watchful.
"You told me about Hannah. What they did to her—the praying, the laying on of hands. All those years they called a sickness a sin." I keep my eyes on the table, because it's easier to say to the wood. "I know everything you’re saying. Not from beside it, the way you do. From inside it."
I make myself look up at her.
"I'm bipolar. Same as your sister." My hands want a job, so I give them the water glass, turn it a quarter turn on the wood. "I came apart a few years back. Bad. They put me in a hospital. Locked ward, the whole thing. Took eight months and a bunch of medication switches before I was anything like a person again."
She doesn't move.
"That's why I sip the wine and never finish it. The meds and the drink don't get along." I turn the glass back the other way. "You noticed. I saw you notice."
She doesn't say any of the things people say.
She doesn't flinch back from the table. She doesn't reach for my hand to tell me howbraveI am, or how she'd never haveguessed. She doesn't reach for a Bible the way the people around her sister did.
She just looks at me, steady, her whole face open.
"Then you're the only person in this town who actually knows what my life has been."
For years, I've kept this thing pulled tight in my chest. It works itself loose, right there at the table.
"Yeah," I say. "I guess I am."
I don't know which of us moves first.
I'd like to say it was her. She's the one who's been wrecked, raw, and grateful. A better man would've held the line harder.
But it might've been me. It might've been me the second she saidthe only person who actually knows.
Because nobody has ever looked at the worst of me and named it the thing that made me useful to them instead of the thing that made me dangerous.
She doesn't stand up right away. She sits there across the table from me, where the empty plate still is, the one I filled with my mother's cooking an hour ago and watched her clean because she'd forgotten to eat all day.
She's looking at me like I'm a problem she doesn't have the equation for.
"You're staring," I tell her.
"I am." She doesn't look away. Her thumb finds the inside of her own wrist and works a slow circle there. "I keep waiting to be afraid of you. You're exactly what my mother spent my whole life warning me about. And I sat in your kitchen and ate your mother's food, and I'm not afraid of a single thing… except how much I'm not afraid."
"Sophie."
"I want to tell you something." She says it fast, like ripping off a bandage, and her eyes drop to the table, to the grain of the wood, to anywhere but me. "I already told you I've never done this. I don't think I said it plain enough. I'm a virgin. I'm twenty-six, and I'm the deacon's daughter, and I've never—and I know how that?—"