He didn't just frame Sophie. He turned her own father into the blade.
"And Caleb," I say, because somebody has to, because it's the part I haven't been able to set down. "The kid. Pulled out ofher class day one, before she'd taught a single lesson. That was the seed. You can't sell a town a predator with no incident, so somebody whispered to that boy's mother that her child wasn't safe, got him moved, and let the empty chair do the talking. By the time the pictures came, the town already had the question primed, and the lie walked right into the hole the question left."
"He used a child," Dad says.
It's the first thing my father's said, and it comes out of him low and terrible.
"He used a baby and a good woman to climb half a rung in a church nobody outside that county's ever heard of." Dad's hands are flat on the table, and I watch the knuckles, because my father's hands tell you things his face won't. "I have done business with killers I respected more."
Here's where the old me would've already been on the bike.
I want to be honest about that, sitting in this room, because pretending the urge isn't there is how it gets you.
The hot thing is awake in me. It's been awake since Dag told me about the flyer.
There's a version of tonight where I ride down to town and find Daniel Hardin, and put my hands on him.
Me forcing him to understand in a language that doesn't need a courtroom.
I can feel that version. It's right there, fully built, satisfying as a struck match.
But I can’t, because I know where that road goes.
"We do it Dag's way," I say.
My voice is steady, and the steadiness isn't a performance. It's what I went away to build, working the way it's supposed to work. "We hand him to a courtroom. We hand him to the church, to the state, to every authority that can take him apart on paper where it sticks. He doesn't get the mercy of my hands. He gets the rest of his life as the man who got caught, andthat's worse. It lasts longer, and it doesn't cost Sophie one single thing."
Runes looks at me for a long moment, and something moves through his face that I'd call pride if I had the right to claim it.
"Say it again," he says quietly. "The part about your hands."
"He doesn't get my hands." I hold his eyes. "He gets a courtroom. I'm not trading my whole life and her whole future for the ten seconds it'd feel good."
"That," Runes says, "is a patched man's answer. You hear me? Whatever the vote says when it comes—and it's coming—you sat in this room with a reason to burn the world down, and you chose the long way because it's the right way." He nods once. "I've been waiting years to hear you do that. Not say it. Do it, with the match in your hand."
Dad's hand comes to the back of my neck, heavy and warm.
He doesn't say a word, and he doesn't have to.
* * *
I ride home in the dark with all of it sitting in my chest, and I don't go straight in when I get there.
I sit on the bike in the gravel for a minute, looking at the low lit windows of the rental, at her moving behind the kitchen curtain, at the whole small warm life that a man in a clerical collar tried to set on fire to move up a chair.
She didn’t do a damn thing.
That's the part I can't get past.
She graded papers and taught kids how to read.
A man looked at all that goodness and saw nothing but a tool he could aim at her father.
I'm not going to be able to give her the satisfaction of my hands on him.
I made that choice in the chapel, and I'd make it again.
But I can give her another thing.