Chapter 10: Judas in Red Paint

He was in the kitchen in last night's shirt, making coffee with his back to me.

I stood in the doorway in his jacket, and nothing else, and watched his shoulders.

"You said you were sorry," I said. "In the dark. For what?"

He didn't turn around.

"For five months. For all the ways I made you leave."

That was true, and it wasn't the whole truth, and he knew I knew.

"Is that an answer?"

"It's the one I've got."

My phone rang before I could say what I thought of it.

Jessamine's voice came out of the speaker, tight and thin.

"Lyd, you need to come. Right now. Somebody's been at the bakery."

We took the car.

The yellow awning was hanging by one corner.

Across the front window, over the painted wheat, somebody had sprayed JUDAS in red letters three feet tall.

Jessamine stood on the sidewalk in her apron with her arms crossed hard over her chest.

A dozen neighbors stood around her, and half of them had a bucket.

"It was like this when I came to open," she said. "Whoever did it broke the glass in the door, too."

"I'm so sorry."

"Don't you dare be sorry. I'm furious. I want it noted, in the record, that I'm furious and not sorry."

A woman from the dry cleaner's next door put a sponge in my hand.

"We love you, honey," she said. "Jessamine says you got shafted."

"Jessamine's right," said a man with a pushcart.

I looked at the people with their buckets.

Not one of them had asked me whether it was true.

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