She pulled away. She opened and closed her mouth wordlessly, searching for the right response. When she found them, they dripped with bitterness. “Maybe if you took a good look around you might not be so sure. People have jobs, Rollie; their kids are going to school. The borders are protected. The shelves are stocked again. The streets are safe. People have access to healthcare. So you tell me, what’s so terrible about all of that? After all the damage, what’s so bad about having a decent person in the White House? He’s not Hitler, you know that.”

“No,” I agreed as calmly as I could manage, “no, he isn’t Hitler. Hitler told the Germans exactly what he intended to do. Then he did it. And they supported him. He was obvious. Wrightman…” I took a deep breath. I shook my head. “Wrightman is devious. He … he…” If I was going to tell her, this would have been the time. And if I had, maybe everything would have been different. But I couldn’t. I stopped.

“He what?” she snapped.

I closed my eyes as I spoke, my voice suddenly calm. “You’re right, Jen, he isn’t Hitler or Mussolini … he isn’t any of them. He’s the Pied Piper and he’s leading the parade with a happy tune. And people are just following him, singing along. They’re happy, all the way to the end.

“And I am so sorry you can’t see that.”

She sat down on the carpet directly in front of Chair, as implacable as the anonymous protester blocking a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square. “Just listen to me, please.” She sobbed, caught herself. She wouldn’t look at me as she continued, instead focusing on her interwoven hands in her lap. “The essence of democracy means sacrificing some of your own rights for the greater good. That’s all Wrightman is doing. Why can’t you see that? What difference does it make if you can’t go online and call the president rotten names if you don’t have to worry about suicide bombers?” She wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. “I love you, Roland Stone, and I love Martha, and I would do anything for either one of you, but I don’t understand why you have to be so rigid. Can’t you just give him a chance?” She looked up at me, her expression a plea for understanding. “Please.”

I picked my next words carefully. All of those mysterious forces that had shaped our lives and led to us being together were breaking us apart. We are, all of us, the sum total of our heritage, our experience, and every teacher we’ve ever had, and Jenny and I could be no less. We saw the world through different filters; we processed the same facts very differently. Those things that seemed so clear and obvious to Jenny were equally foreign and dangerous to me.

She leaned against my leg. I felt nothing, no sensation at all, but I laid my hand on her head and gently kneaded my fingers through her hair. This is what they do, I thought. They turn people against each other. They create mistrust. We sat there like that for several minutes, trying to figure out where to go from here. I heard a siren screaming somewhere in the distance. In the street below my window someone was drunk-singing. Life goes on. I couldn’t identify what I was feeling. A witches’ brew, I guess: a dose of loss, two bits of fear, a snippet of anger, a handful of regret, and a caldron of emptiness. All the words in the world, no matter how cleverly strung together, would not be enough to put us back together whole. It was amazing to me that she couldn’t see the steep cliff waiting at the end of this road, a road rutted with compromise.