“She’s not even tired,” Arman hollered after Kiki. “Her sleeping is messed up enough as it is.” They could hear Kiki’s footsteps going up the stairs and padding across the hallway. “What?” he said to Sarah. “Don’t give me that disapproving look. It is. She read this book about babies needing twice as much sleep as previously thought. Did you ever put your eight-month-old to sleep whenever she seemed remotely tired?”

“It doesn’t matter what I did.”

Matthew opened the door.

“Where are you going?” Sarah asked. “I thought you were exhausted.”

He ignored her and stepped outside.

“Matthew,” she called after him; the screen door slammed shut.

Arman was shaking his head, suppressing a grin.

“Don’t shake your head at me,” she said lightly, before realizing how insulted she was. “We aren’t getting along. It’s a little ugly. I know that.”

“You know ugly?”

“I do.”

“Real ugliness?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, “I know about that, too.”

“Why do I doubt that?”

“I don’t know.” She twisted her hands together, squeezed until her rings dug into her skin. “I can’t help you there.”

“You know, when we moved up here, I wasn’t exactly prepared for the poverty. It’s real.”

“Of course it’s real. This was news to you?”

“People are pissed.”

“As they should be.”

“People are really pissed. The factories are all closing, there’s meth everywhere, and the heroin—”

“And what?” she asked, while getting a handle on his tone, which was increasingly condescending. “You identify with these people in crisis?”

“I do, actually.”

“You do.”

He nodded. “I mean, I get it. I get why they resent me and what I look like.”

“And you look like what—a movie star?”

“Some guy wouldn’t sell me firecrackers last month because he thought I was ‘an Arab.’”

“Jesus. That’s infuriating.”

“I’m no movie star, Sarah. We both know that.”

“Ah, aha. But you look like one.” She smiled.

Arman shook his head with a laugh that seemed distinctly bittersweet. “They see me as an outsider and threatening.”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“They want to protect what they have. What little they have.”

“We both know this story and how it ends. Every day there’s a retelling of this story. Please don’t tell me you’re sympathetic to—what do they call it now?—racial resentment? Racial anxiety?”

“You don’t have any idea. You just don’t.”

She was disturbed by where this conversation was headed, that he seemed hell-bent on exposing her privileged cluelessness, but she was also afraid of how angry Matthew was. He usually took a run or a walk to ward off rage and despair. She looked out the window. He was nowhere in sight. She kept thinking she should go find him, but she also knew that if she did, that if she tried to question him right then, he would leave her. Somehow she knew he would.