When the door opens—and I jump out of my skin—it’s not even Kimberly. Of course it’s not. She’s not due in for an hour.

It’s Yvonne. Looking dead serious.

“Hey.” I greet her with a smile anyway. “What’s going on?”

“It’s the funeral this morning,” she says.

Right. That’s enough to bring anyone down. “Yeah, I heard that on the news.”

Yvonne shakes her head. “There’s a problem. Unexpected.” She looks downright shaky all over.

“How can I help?”

Yvonne sinks into the chair on the other side of my desk. She bursts into tears. Whispers. “She was a child.”

My hands fumble toward a tissue box that I know is somewhere.… There it is.

I pull one. Two. Three. Fork them over. “I know. It’s a tragedy.”

She lets it go for a minute. I don’t really know what to do. My impulse is to go over and hug her or something. We’re friends, I guess. But she’s sort of my boss, and again, there’s an underlying no-touching rule about the workplace that’s hard to get over. I settle for pulling more tissues. Maybe there is no comfort, anyway, in the face of human cruelty.

Yvonne takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I’m supposed to be smooth and in charge.”

“Hey, don’t worry about it,” I assure her. “This is a rough one for all of us.”

Her tearful smile contains a thousand years of suffering.

“There are protestors,” she says finally. “At the funeral. They showed up with signs.”

“Not my SCORE crew. We didn’t arrange for that.”

“No.” Yvonne clears her throat. “Not us. Not on behalf of Shae.”

That doesn’t compute. “They’re protesting the funeral?”

Yvonne nods. “Someone organized a group. I don’t know from where.”

She turns her phone to face me. The image on the screen strikes hard. All the breath rushes out of me. The background is filled with the chests, knees, and arms of several adults carrying posters and banner sticks. The focus is on a small girl, not more than ten, standing at the front of the group. Her long blond pigtails fall over her shoulders, framing the hand-lettered sign at her chest:

SHE HAD IT COMING.

KIMBERLY

Zeke’s call makes no sense, and neither does this vision of the small clump of white women outside the funeral. From the corner of the church steps, they sprawl out in front of me, a sea of hateful signs, hateful faces. It is impossible to comprehend and yet it’s taking place in real time. The edges of two different worlds collide and the aftershocks would bring me to my knees. But I have a job to do.