“You mean I don’t seem fine because I’m, what? Edgy? I’m edgy, okay? I admit I’m definitely edgy. But I’ll feel less edgy in the country.” She’d spent a good half hour working with concealer and powder, only to take most of it off. Now she swiped on some mascara without looking in the mirror, blinked several times. “So let’s go.”

“I just think—”

“Matthew? Let’s just go.”

HE BLASTED DJANGO REINHARDT, drummed on the steering wheel while driving north, annoyingly immersed in the music.

“Do you remember Leda’s essay?” she asked suddenly. They hadn’t spoken in a good forty minutes.

She knew he hated turning the volume down to listen, especially in a moving car, but today she didn’t care. If her injuries and possibly budding PTSD were bad enough that he’d suggested staying in the city, if he’d been solicitous enough to bring her a croissant and latte in bed, shouldn’t he try talking to her on the drive? She opened the window. He turned off the AC. She closed it immediately. He turned it back on.

She thought, We’re going to talk the rest of the way if I feel like it; I was basically punched in the fucking face.

“Do you remember Leda’s essay?” she repeated.

He turned the volume down. “Which one?”

“I kept it on the fridge?”

“From when she was little. You mean the one we should have seen as a red flag?”

“It wasn’t a red flag,” she snapped.

“I know. I know. I was kidding.”

Out the window on the highway there was a flash of a blue car glinting in the sun; it looked like a sapphire, like—she remembered—Kiki’s engagement ring.

“Please”—she kept her voice low and clear—“please don’t read into her childhood and turn everything into something it wasn’t. Because it wasn’t a red flag.”

“I said I was kidding. You know I was.”

“Well, you know I hate when you do that, so please just don’t.”

He nodded.

“It was a perfect essay.”

“I know it,” he said, and she instantly regretted taking him to task. She needed his levity; she knew she did. So why did she insist on fighting it?

If you had the chance, the fourth-grade teacher had asked, how would you change the world?

The essays were posted throughout the classroom on parents’ night. Ending world hunger was a popular response. So was more television watching and candy eating for humans under twelve.