She did not say any of this. She said, "I'd like to take tonight."
"Of course," Douglas said, already standing, already relieved. "Talk to Pete. But don't sleep on it too long, kiddo. These things get away from you."
She took the 6:12 home to Hastings, standing the whole way because she could not make herself sit, and walked up the hill from the station in the cold. Pete was in the kitchen in his school cardigan, grading at the counter with the radio on and a pot of something on the stove. He was fifty and soft around the middle and had taught American history at Mount Vernon High School for twenty-three years. His students, most of them Black and Caribbean and Latino, called him Mr. C and gave him grief about his sweaters. She had always been privately proud of where he taught, the way you're proud of a good view from a house — as if it said something about the person who lived there.
He looked up and his face changed. "Hey. What happened?"
She told him all of it, in order, the way she had made herself reconstruct it at her desk: the eye-close, the sentence, the chair, Douglas, the email that said on my own. She told it without excusing it, and noticed how hard that was, how the excuses kept rising in her throat and she kept swallowing them.
When she finished, Pete turned off the radio and the burner.
"What did you think he was?" he said finally.
"I didn't think anything. That's what I keep — I didn't think it, Pete. It just—"
"Lin." He said it gently. "That's the thing. That's exactly what it is."
He sat down across from her at the table.
"My first year at Mount Vernon," he said, "I had a kid named DeShawn who was failing. Smart kid, doing nothing. Parent-teacher night, this tall guy in a suit walks into my room, and I stand up and say, 'Are you here for DeShawn?' Because DeShawn was the kid I'd been worried about, and he was the Black man who walked in." Pete rubbed his face. "It was the assistant principal. Mr. Boateng. Come to see how the new guy was doing. He said, 'I'm here for you, Mr. Corrigan,' and sat in the back and watched me teach a lesson on Reconstruction." He almost laughed. "On Reconstruction. I wanted to die."