We’re the worst? thought Macey. She had been brought up to believe in the perfection of this, her home: Every sugar maple tree, stone wall, church steeple and high tide was perfect.

“But we never had awful laws here. That was the South,” said her mother. “The segregation today is an accident of wealth or lack of wealth.”

Her father was falling asleep. He slept in a neat, condensed way, his chin on his chest, his arms folded around him.

Macey picked up his book. Her eyes wandered down the chapter descriptions in the front. Thirty-six was about desegregation, which seemed like a lot of chapters to wait.

It began with Rosa Parks. It turned out that Rosa Parks got on the bus in 1955. Four years before Mr. Sibley’s fire. Mom had been seven. When the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, began (the first thing in desegregation the whole country noticed), Martin Luther King, Jr., had been twenty-six. In 1956, said the book, Martin Luther King’s house was bombed. He had babies. They were home.

Macey closed the book.

Her mother was immersed in her computer screen. Her father had slid lower on the couch, deeper into sleep.

Macey could not imagine anybody closing a hand around an explosive.

Or could she?

She knew now what arson was. She knew how fire felt, and how smoke tasted. She stared at the dark shimmer of glass that faced the street. The Clares never pulled curtains. They were comfortable with the dark. But there was another kind of dark. The darkness of minds full of hate.

And Mr. Sibley—what mind full of hate had he met?

Macey read on.

A civil rights leader said to the young Reverend King, as he first began to lead, “The Lord has laid his hands on you, and that is a dangerous thing.”

Macey imagined the hands of the Lord falling on her shoulders, touching her forehead, His voice saying, You must do this.

The chapter ended way too soon. Macey had hardly learned anything. The book went on to Marilyn Monroe. Macey could not believe it. How did they go from bombing a minister’s house to a sex goddess?

Hands fell on her shoulder, and Macey almost screamed.

“Sorry,” said her father. “I thought you knew me.”

“I was in the fifties,” said Macey. “I thought you were the hands of the Lord.”

Macey had not read under the covers in years.

She didn’t have to now. It would never cross her parents’ minds to check whether her lights were out. But it felt safer under the covers, with the heat and weight of blankets tucking her in.

The story picked up in chapter forty-four.