“Typical,” I muttered, shaking my head. I brushed a lock of Brianna’s hair back from her face and said quietly, “Don’t you worry about it, honey. You just stay away from those kids, okay? They’ll be at your school this week, but you don’t have to play with them. It’s not right that they’re here. You’re a nice girl, so I know you want people to like you, but you don’t have to go along with something when you know it’s not right.”

The sun was low in the sky as I parked in the driveway, but the lights were out in Henry’s apartment above our garage. Calvin would soon follow me in his own car once he finished saying goodbye to the guests. He was still angry with me and I hated that, but I wasn’t sure what to do about it.

I found Henry in my kitchen. A pot of potatoes was bubbling furiously on the back burner, and on the front, he was frying chicken.

“Mmm,” I said, surprised. “That smells good.”

“I was bored, so I thought I’d cook us some dinner,” he said, looking down at the pan. “How were the Nazis?”

“Terrible,” I muttered, throwing my keys and handbag onto the table. “One of their kids pushed little Brianna clean over and then refused to say sorry, and one of the women actually picked a fight with me.”

Henry looked up at me in alarm.

“Who picked a fight with you?”

“You know how Cal keeps talking about Jürgen Rhodes? The man who designed those V-2 rockets that did so much damage to London?” Henry nodded. “Well, I was talking to Becca, and then his wife started yelling at me about—” I broke off. It was all a bit fuzzy, my memory blurred by the champagne and the anger I’d felt. “Something about how segregation is the same as the extermination camps.” I paused. That wasn’t quite it, but it was close enough.

Henry stared at me, his jaw open but his eyes a little glazed, like he wasn’t quite following the conversation.

“Segregation is terrible,” he said.

“I know,” I sighed. Having lived in El Paso for years, I was no stranger to bigotry. Half of that city was Mexican or of Mexican descent, and white folk often acted like that was a bad thing. Huntsville was like two separate towns that happened to be colocated, and it seemed that having poorly treated Black staff members within a household was just the normal order of business for some. I hated it. Not that I was about to admit that to Sofie Rhodes.

“My division liberated a camp in Germany,” Henry said suddenly, turning his attention back to the chicken.

It was my turn to feel dazed. Henry spoke so rarely about his deployment that I’d given up asking about it a long time ago.