“Which was it? You thought I knew, or you were going to say something? It can’t be both!”

“It is both. I wanted to talk to you about it, to clear the air, but I also was sure that you knew. When we talked about it, it seemed like you knew.”

“I didn’t know. I almost died.”

“Why didn’t you stay in the room? What were you thinking?”

“I was looking for you,” she said. “I was going to save you! Why didn’t you come back?”

“It was raining too hard! Tree limbs were falling! Even Tom saw that we couldn’t make it to the shed! Any reasonable person could see that it wasn’t safe!”

“I am not a reasonable person! You know this about me!”

“I know,” he said finally, defeat in his voice, maybe even remorse. “I’m sorry. That’s the difference between us.”

“It is,” Marianne agreed. She could tell they felt differently about what they were agreeing to, felt the admission diminished the other person. What it meant was: they could not be together. What it meant was: she’d been wrong about him.

It took three days to get back to the Ranch, there was so much damage to the roads. All the classrooms and dormitories were flooded, the water line halfway up the walls, and there were big tree limbs everywhere. Lilian found a small, hand-sewn notebook, the pages splayed and waterlogged. “Dear Ruth,” she read, “Here I am, trapped in a motel with my ugly bear list. Serves me right.”

Everybody knew it was Marianne’s, but they were so glad to be alive they weren’t even mad—they thought it was funny, no hard feelings, back to business as usual. No one talked about her newspaper admissions, the fact that the school was founded dishonestly, although Eric and Regina were already on damage control, offering reassurances and refunds and scholarships. No one blamed Marianne outright, not Eric, not Regina, not Lilian or Davonte or Janine. But the Christians among them—Marianne guessed that was everybody but Eric—could not miss the message that God destroyed what she built, that her arrogance was being punished. She knew, once they got away from their own mortality, that their forgiveness would be temporary.

And it was.

So she went home—not to New York, but to Virginia. Her father knew, by then, about the scandal and the storm, but he didn’t ask many questions, and they fell into a mostly silent routine: up at dawn, coffee, a long walk, more coffee, work. Marianne felt a little bereft, watching him grade the stack of papers that was always on the dining table, a little naked without her own admissions folders to cart around. She read; she worked on poems; she sent texts and emails to Ruth, all unanswered.