“Officer, I . . .” I grew up in Palos fucking Verdes. “I understand your concerns . . .” You don’t know shit about me. You don’t know shit about Iran. You don’t know shit about anything but this cartoon caricature you’ve constructed about every culture that isn’t your own meathead version of whiteness. “But I give you my word, I didn’t have anything to do with it.” I want you to look me in the eye and tell me you’ve never abused your power before, you absolute fucking ghoul.

“Is there a possibility she might have done this to herself?” asked Lanning, the slightly less dumb of the two.

Barely holding it together, he said, “It was a very bad fall.”

The police took his address, no doubt to check to see if there had been any other domestic disturbances, and left him alone. Some twenty minutes later, Cora was released from the ER, wrapped in a hospital blanket, a tiara of white gauze around her head. It wasn’t so bad, they said, only three stitches.

Cora was silent from the moment he put his arm around her shoulder to guide her out of the hospital, and he caught a glimpse of the way the doctor and RN looked at him. At first, he mistook it for judgment, that, like the police officers, they looked at him and saw only a crazed Muslim invader who had infiltrated this country to beat and rape its white women before eventually strapping on an AK-47 and shooting up a mall. But instead, he saw concern in their faces. Pity, even. They knew he didn’t do it. They knew who did.

It took him a moment to decompress before he found the spirit in him to turn the car on, all the while Cora wearing an expression like she’d gotten a lobotomy. She didn’t say anything the whole drive back, which now that the sun was up took a bit longer than it had getting there. They listened to the radio. Britney Spears’s “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” crooned back at them, and unable to handle how on the nose that was, Kaveh changed the channel to some awful morning DJs making ET jokes.

When they got home, Cora let him guide her like she was an automaton. He gave her a Xanax and some ibuprofen, and in the absence of something comforting to say, gave her a long kiss on the forehead. He then gave her a clean shirt and a pair of shorts to put on, and watched her as she mechanically took off her clothes and replaced them. He instructed her to get into bed and rest, told her that he was taking the day off and was going to stay with her. She obeyed him without a word, all the while not looking at him in the eye once.