“We all have to do what we can to get through,” Ricky said, and the Rangers in the room agreed with the sentiment. One by one, they each acknowledged that something had shifted in the past four weeks, not just in the world at large but on the job too. They were dealing with things they’d never seen in their lifetimes, stories they’d only heard from the older men in the department: church burnings; the defacement of a mosque in Bryan; black and brown kids shoved in lunchrooms, spit on in gym class; a Mexican woman currently in critical condition after she was attacked in front of her husband and three kids in the parking lot of a Kroger in Fort Worth. Buddy spoke of a hotbed of trouble near Jefferson in Marion County. He might even have mentioned a missing kid out that way. But Darren might have remembered it wrong.

Things got a little fuzzy after that.

He managed to go an hour before switching from beer to whiskey, but the slide was fast. It made wax of his spine, the liquor did; made everything go soft at the edges, melting away all the departmental talk, all their tales from the field, of which Darren had none. He was landlocked at the Houston office these days, bored in a way he was scared to admit to himself, afraid the word hid a deeper truth as blue as the record that was playing: Darren was depressed, sick with a rage that was eating him from the inside. Daily, he marveled with befuddled anger at what a handful of scared white people could do to a nation. He never again wanted to hear them question the point of rioting in Ferguson or Baltimore, or Watts and Detroit for that matter, hear them wonder why black folks would torch their own neighborhoods, because in an act of blind fury, white voters had just lit a match to the very country they claimed to love—simply because they were being asked to share it. And that’s the bit that stung, the hurt that cut bone-deep. After years of being lulled into believing that the universe bent toward justice, he saw how little friends and neighbors thought of his life, of his right to this country.

After Obama, it was forgiveness betrayed.