She filed it behind Nguyen's summary and in front of the policy PDF. The binder thickened. So did Isaiah's sound.
In late October of that first Northside year, Ortiz asked Naomi to speak—voluntarily, briefly—to a staff training on student dignity and physical boundaries. Naomi hesitated. Isaiah said, "You should. You're good at saying the true thing without turning it into a show." She went. She spoke for twelve minutes to a room of teachers who had chosen to be there. She did not use Isaiah's name. She used the phrase hands as punctuation and watched understanding move across faces like wind across wheat. Afterward, a young white teacher with trembling hands thanked her and said he had grabbed a student's sleeve last month without thinking and had not stopped thinking since. Naomi told him thinking afterward was the beginning of better practice. She drove home drained and oddly light.
Isaiah was asleep when she got there, clarinet cleaned and laid out on his desk like a tool respected. Naomi stood in his doorway and let the ordinary miracle of his breathing fill her. She whispered, because mothers sometimes need to say true things to sleeping children, "I will always come."
The radiator clanked, as if answering in Corinne's building's old language. Naomi went to bed and slept without dreams for the first time in months.
Harlan Briggs retired in June with a reception Naomi did not attend. She saw photographs later on a public social page: cake, balloons, a banner that said THANK YOU FOR THE MUSIC. Former students posed with him. Someone had given him a framed baton. In one image, Briggs smiled with his arm around a parent who had written, months earlier, that children these days were too soft. Naomi screenshotted nothing. She closed the tab and went for a walk until her anger became movement instead of poison.