Anna arrived at the warehouse Saturday morning to find that someone had painted the words NIGGER LOVER in huge red letters on the side of the building by the door. A wave of nausea moved through her and she pressed her hands to her mouth. Who had done it? Had it been someone from the crowd who’d watched her pounce the cartoon on Wednesday? Someone who stood there with ugliness in his heart while she’d giddily, naïvely, happily gone about her tasks with Peter and Jesse helping her? She hated the thought of Jesse arriving that morning and seeing those words in a place he’d come to feel comfortable and important. She wished she could snap her fingers and make them go away.

As she stood there trying to figure out what to do, she spotted Peter riding his bike up the dirt road toward the warehouse. Then suddenly, a good distance before he reached her, he turned around and headed back the way he’d come.

“Peter!” she called after him, her hands a megaphone around her mouth. She suddenly felt spooked being there alone and wanted someone—anyone but Jesse—with her. She couldn’t imagine why Peter was riding away like that. Surely he’d seen the words, though. They were big enough to see from a distance. Maybe he felt the way she did: neither of them wanted to be there when Jesse arrived.

She thought of leaving, nervous about being there by herself, but she wouldn’t let whoever had done this frighten her away, especially not today—the day she would begin painting. Steeling herself, she opened the warehouse door, walked inside, and turned on all the lights to illuminate every inch of the space.

She was mixing paint a short time later when Jesse showed up. He walked into the warehouse as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. Stopping right inside the door, he slumped heavily against the wall.

“I’m so sorry, Jesse,” Anna said.

“Maybe I shouldn’t come here,” he said. “Daddy says no good can come of it. Maybe he’s right.”

Anna hesitated. She wanted to say, No he’s not right! You deserve to be here every bit as much as Peter, but she was worried. A person who wrote such ugly words in the middle of the night might be capable of doing even uglier deeds. In that moment, she felt afraid, both for Jesse and herself. She thought back to Wednesday. What must the crowd have thought when Jesse and Peter and Anna displayed such a casual and easy camaraderie among them? Had it been misinterpreted? Did the “lover” on the wall of her warehouse imply something more than the fact that she treated Jesse the way she treated everyone else?

All those thoughts ran through her mind in the seconds after Jesse spoke. Finally, she found her voice.