Page 133 of ClickBack

I look back at her. “I’m not going to tell you I’ll never want to get in front of something again. Somebody puts your address up, I’m reporting it. But you hear from me while I do it. And nobody speaks for you because I said they could.”

“That’s what I needed.”

“It should not have taken all this.”

“No.”

She gets up and goes to the mantel. There are photographs of Rae and Zion, one of her mother, another I have never asked about. Giselle rests her hand beside that one without picking it up.

“I’m not ready to tell you everything,” she says. “Rae asked me some questions. I owe her answers first.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything to make this make sense.”

“I want to tell you this part.”

I sit back and let her.

“They took the crown back.”

The girl in the photograph comes back to me. Her careful smile. That sash across a dress somebody had helped her choose.

“After they found out I was pregnant, they decided I couldn’t represent the town anymore. People remember me winning. They like remembering that. First Black girl. Everybody proud.”

Her hand shifts against the mantel.

“They don’t usually mention what they did afterward.”

I want names. I want to know who made her sit in that room and who let them. The questions arrive fast, and I keep them to myself because she is still talking.

“I came back here and made a life. A good one. I worked. I raised my daughter. I made sure anybody who had something to say would have to say it about a woman who had done everything she was supposed to.”

She turns toward me.

“Then somebody posted a picture of me laughing with you, and I found out how little of that they needed to forget.”

“Zel.”

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life earning the right to have one good afternoon.”

“You shouldn’t have to.”

“I’m tired of doing it anyway.”

She stays by the mantel. I stay in the chair, though everything in me wants to get up. Her face is wet now. She wipes it with the heel of her hand, annoyed, and I reach toward the tissue box on the table. I hold it out. She comes far enough to take one, then sits on the edge of the sofa across from me.

“I missed you,” she says.

“I missed you, too.”

“I did not enjoy it.”

That gets a laugh out of me, small and badly timed. She looks at me until I stop trying to hide it.

“Neither did I.”

“I kept thinking about what I should have done differently.” She folds the tissue. “As if I could find the exact sensible thing that would have kept me from caring this much.”

“What would you have done?”