Ayanna sniffed. The room still smelled a little, like a refrigerator filled with meat and produce abandoned for a sudden long trip. She paused again, stood up, and cracked the window. Outside, it was pouring, the wind ripping off any tentative leaves and slapping them into gutters and swirling them along the sidewalks.

Later, the woman had tracked down Matthias’s family and told him his mouth had felt like a burn each time on her skin. The woman had been living with brain cancer, but when she went to the doctors after that, all her scans were clean.

“She told me I saved her life.” For the first time, Matthias smiled. “I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since.”

The Simone studio audience broke into rapturous applause. What Matthias was saying was very nice, Ayanna conceded, but infuriating because no one was asking for proof. She felt certain, looking at the freeze-framed image of him smiling and all the women in the studio audience behind him applauding, that if he were a woman, or not white, or even less attractive, there would be at least one person who couldn’t handle what he was saying. It was too simple for someone not to doubt. We live in a world, Ayanna thought, with doors that people ignore or still call hoaxes, a world people call flat, filled with disease disbelievers and people who refuse to believe humans have ever even been to the moon, a world where when you read about history and see all the cruelties, all the wars and violence people have inflicted on one another and did not question, it often seems impossible that people are still alive at all. But this dude can claim to heal people with his hands? Sure. This is the thing everyone seems willing to believe.

Maybe the Simone studio audience, though, was the wrong place to look for dissenters. Famously, they all received gifts from Simone—bags filled with retinol, cashmere shawls, candles promising to smell like a romantic night by the shore, granola bars promising to make your face less red and your eyes clearer, and assorted other objects that spoke to aspirations of having a life only involved in the mathematics of maximizing comfort. There were many popular videos on social media of people going through their Simone gift bags and ranking the gifts, estimating the costs, and talking about how wonderful the experience was.

Then, Simone reminded everyone that Matthias was a child of miracles. His mother was “the famous pastor’s wife.” The camera moved in closer and closer to Simone as she told the story Ayanna had heard so many times now: a grieving man, a blue door near a mountain range, a long walk home. And now the new addition: a child.