Reverend Hardin in the pulpit, building a sermon about bearing false witness, with my name nowhere in it and everywhere in it at once.
Dag writes it all down, and at one point he and Esperanza look at each other over my head, a quick look, a married-people look, and Esperanza taps her pen against the folder.
"This is a lot of effort," she says, almost to herself. "For a small-town spat. Fabricated digital evidence, this clean, takes know-how. Or money. Or both." She makes a note. "Most people who hate a schoolteacher just talk. Somebody went to real trouble here."
"What does that mean?" I ask.
"It means," she says, "that I have one more question than I started with. Don't you worry about it. That's my job." She stands, and she takes my hand again, both of hers around mine. "Your job is to paint Meghan's wall and let me do mine."
They leave, and the afternoon goes on, and I paint.
I cut clean lines along Meghan's ceiling until my shoulder aches, and Dasha tells me a long ridiculous story about Rio and a deep fryer.
Meghan brings around sandwiches at two and tells me I'm hired for the rest of the buildout if I want it, which is more money than I let myself hope for, and the brown paper on the windows goes gold as the light slides west.
Somewhere in there I catch sight of myself in the bathroom mirror—paint on my cheek, hair coming loose, my daddy's careful cut-in lines drying clean and straight on the wall behind me—and I stop.
I don't recognize her, the woman in the glass. Not in a bad way.
This morning, I woke up in a man's bed, took something for myself, and the sky stayed up.
This afternoon, I've got two lawyers who said how the board is wrong, and a woman who handed me a brush instead of a verdict, and another who called me Njal’s girl like it was the simplest thing in the world.
I'm not the school's scandal up there in the glass. I'm not Hannah's sister, or the deacon's disgraced daughter the whole town's already made up its mind about.
I'm just a woman on a ladder with paint on her face, doing good work, fighting back.
A few days ago, they took my keys and I sat in my truck and broke apart because I had nobody.
I'm not nobody anymore.
When the light's nearly gone, the front door opens, and Njal comes in off the crew, drywall dust in his hair.
His eyes find me across the half-painted room—me, on a ladder, with paint to my elbows and Dasha steadying the legs and Meghan hollering that we're losing the light.
He doesn't smile, exactly. He's not a man who smiles too much.
But something in his face eases when he sees me up there, working, part of it, and I feel it settle in my chest like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I'd been waiting to open.
"You're still here," he says.
"I'm hired," I tell him, and I hear the wonder in my own voice. "For the whole buildout. Meghan said."
"I heard." He stops at the bottom of the ladder and looks up at me, the drywall dust and the dying light and the smell of fresh paint all hang there between us. "Good day, then."
I look down at him—this quiet, scarred, broken-and-mended man who went out in the middle of the night to fetch my dog so I wouldn't worry—and I think thatgooddoesn't begin to cover it.
"Yeah," I say. "Good day."
CHAPTER EIGHT
Njal
The drywall dust is still in my hair when I get home, and I don't shower it out right away.
I stand in my kitchen with the dust and the paint smell on me, and I think about her on that ladder.
All afternoon she was up there, paint to her elbows, Dasha holding the legs and Meghan hollering that they were losing the light.