Maybe he’d grown up poor, like her. Maybe he’d learned empathy and watchfulness from his years of teaching. But the way he’d stepped back from a simple glare…she’d seen that kind of reaction before. In some of the neighbor kids at the trailer park. In the wife of one of Barton’s colleagues. In some of her students, the ones she watched for bruises. And she wondered. About his childhood. About his marriage. It was foolish. She barely knew the man. She could be entirely wrong in every way. Still, what she was wondering burned in her chest like coals.
