He stops with a plate in his hand. "Why would I do that?"
"Because—" I set down the dish towel. My hands aren't steady. "Because look at me, Njal. Look at what I am right now. I'm a woman who got fired by letter. I'm a name in a Facebook post that four hundred people shared. I'm what they whisper about in the cereal aisle. And you want to bring your brother down here, and your mother, and stake your whole family's name to mine like I'm not radioactive."
"You're not radioactive."
"I'm a child predator, Njal!" It comes out of me too loud in the small kitchen, and I hear myself say the word and hate it. I keep going anyway because it's been building for days and it has to come out somewhere.
"That's what they think I am. That's what the whole town thinks, and the whole internet, and my own father. And you want to drive your family straight into the middle of it. Your club already took my case. Your president already knows my name. What happens to all of that when this doesn't go away? When it follows you? When somebody runs your club's name through a search and there I am, attached to it forever, the teacher who?—"
"Stop."
"—I won't do it." My voice breaks. "I won't be the reason you get dragged back down. You clawed your way out of somewhere most people don't come back from. You told me that yourself. And I’m not going to be why the world looks at you and sees the man standing next to a monster."
The kitchen goes silent except for the water running, which he reaches over and shuts off.
He sets the plate down.
He turns to face me fully, and his face isn't hurt, the way I braced for.
It's something steadier and harder than hurt.
"You done?" he asks.
"Njal—"
"No, I want to know if you're done, because I'm going to say some things back, and I need you to actually hear them." He waits. I don't say anything. "Okay. First, you don't get to decide for me what's good for me. There was a whole town and a whole family deciding things for you your entire life—what you could want, what you were worth, what kind of woman you were allowed to be—and I will not stand in this kitchen and watch you do the exact same thing to me in the name of love. You don't get to protect me by making my choices for me. That's not protection. That's just the old cage with your hands on the bars instead of theirs."
I open my mouth. Nothing comes.
"Second." His voice drops, goes rough. "You think I don't know what radioactive is? Sophie. I killed three men. I spent months on a locked ward not knowing what day it was. The world had every reason to look at me and see a monster, and you want to know what my family did? They drove an hour every week to sit with the monster until he came back to himself. That's what we are. We don't run from the hard shit in life. We sit down next to it. So, when I tell you my mother wants to feed you and my brother wants to meet you, what I'm telling you is they already know exactly what they're walking into, and they're coming anyway, because that's the whole point of having people."
The tears are coming again and I can't stop them.
"And third." He steps in close and takes my face in both his hands, and his thumbs catch the wet on my cheeks. "You are not a monster, and you don't get to talk about the woman Iclaimed that way. That's mine to defend now, you understand? The whole list of who you are. And I'm not handing one inch of it back to a school board, a Facebook post, your daddy, or you on your worst night. So don't ask me to."
I press my face into his palm and I cry, ugly and exhausted, all the stress finally breaking through.
He holds my face, and lets me ruin myself against his hands, and doesn't once let go.
* * *
Later, in the dark, when I've cried myself down to the hiccupping quiet and we're lying tangled in his bed with Hoagie, I say what's underneath all the rest of it.
"I don't know how to let people stay," I tell his collarbone. "I've never had it. Everyone who was supposed to love me had conditions on it. And I keep trying to push you away before you can leave, because at least if I do it first, it won't be a surprise. I know that's what I'm doing. I just don't know how to stop."
His arm tightens around me.
"You don't have to know how," he says. "You just have to not get your way. And lucky for you, I'm stubborn as a fence post and got nowhere else to be."
A laugh comes out of me, wet and surprised. He kisses the top of my head, and for a minute the world is small and warm and survivable.
But I lie awake after he's asleep, listening to him breathe, and the thought won't leave me alone—that there's a whole life out there past this town, past these people who decided what I was before they ever looked, and I have never once let myself imagine walking toward it.
I call Hannah in the morning, on the porch, while Njal's still asleep.
She picks up on the second ring like she's been waiting, and the second I hear her voice—steady, the voice of a woman who learned the hard way how to keep herself level-minded, I start to cry again.
"They fired me, Han."