“To time off,” I repeated.

The waiter cleared our table then, and Kelly explained how she’d grown up in Tallahassee and moved to Charleston as a teenager. Her mother was an E.R. nurse, and her father worked in a machine shop as a foreman.

After supper, we walked back, and I stood outside her place as she finished her story. It ended with her taking a leap of faith on this new school in Mason Falls. A place that had ten times the resources of her old school.

We hit that awkward moment. Was she going to ask me up? Did I want to start something with a woman who is this fragile after a school shooting?

“Do you wanna come in for a minute?” Kelly asked.

“Sure,” I said, and she unlocked the front door.

Inside was an expansive room, one that suggested someone had taken down a spare bedroom and made one giant space. Leaning against the walls, but not hung, were bright orange paintings on stretched canvas, most of them hard to make sense of. Across many of the pieces, a few dots or lines sat against a field of color.

“You coming or going?” I pointed to the screws that were sunk into the wall, a few feet above where each painting leaned.

“I took the old art down,” she said. “To make way for new stuff.”

I stared at the artwork. The paintings on the far wall looked like a splash of flecks to me. Like someone had made a mistake with their brush.

“You don’t like ’em,” she said, nervously tucking a string of curly hair behind her ear.

“No, I just, uh . . . they’re modern,” I said. “I’m ignorant of art. Wouldn’t know what to look for.”

Kelly broke open a bottle of wine. “You want a glass?”

“I don’t drink,” I said.

“Right,” she said. “Dr Pepper. I thought that was about driving home.”

We sat down on her couch, and I thought about Kelly changing her whole life to come here for this school. And now the shooting happened.

“These kids in your class—are they talented?”

“Oh yeah,” she said. “Your boss’s daughter, Avis. Her freehand sketches are amazing.”

“And it’s that much of a difference?” I asked. “Falls Magnet versus your old school?”

“Oh my God, P.T.” She sat up, sipping from her glass. “Back home we were begging the parents to bring in paper towels and using house paint. Here, we have a fifty-thousand-dollar paint studio that rivals a college.”

She described all the equipment that Falls Magnet had, most of it in that attached room where the shooter had entered. The one with the kiln and the press. It crossed my mind that there was an elephant in the room.

A man had held a gun to her head. And I was the one who’d saved her life by killing him. Neither one of us had said a word about it all night.

I excused myself to use the restroom. As I washed my hands after, I decided that I’d bring it up. At least to clear the air. I was no saint, and I didn’t want her to see me that way.