He didn’t answer. Just picked up the bar and pushed all his strength up through the weight of it over and over again. All that effort changed nothing. But maybe it would make him tired enough that he could bear it for another night.

She sat down against the wall of the shed, her legs crossed carelessly in front of her as she stared at the floor. The bar started to tilt in his hands, and he snapped his gaze straight again.

“I thought I understood,” she said. “Back in Montana, when you’d get upset because people were looking at you. After a couple of days here, I thought I really got it, you know? How self-conscious it makes you feel. But everything you’re talking about, it doesn’t make sense to me. Even when you told me you got pulled over taking the ranch truck to get an oil change, I thought, they must have had another reason. I mean, inside their heads, do they know they’re treating you different because you’re . . . black?”

The bar wobbled, and he had to set it back in the supports, even though he wasn’t anywhere near ready to stop. He ground his teeth, trying to rein himself in enough to speak. “That little hesitation before you said ‘black,’ like it’s a dirty word? That’s what it is, Andra. That’s the whole damned thing.”

“What do you mean? I wasn’t—I didn’t mean to . . .” In his peripheral vision, he saw her curl a little tighter. “I just don’t know if it’s okay to say. If I say it, am I the same as they are, boiling everything down to a color?”

He rolled up to sitting. “It is a color, but it’s a hell of a lot more than that. Black is what I am, Andra.”

“But it’s not everything you are!” She sat up straighter. “There are a million things about you that have nothing to do with that, and—”

“Of course there are. But they don’t change what people see when they look at me.” He grabbed her hand. She tensed at the speed of the movement but didn’t pull away. “Look.” He held their hands up in front of her face, her fingers starkly pale against his. “Just look, for once. They’re never going to look the same. And when white people claim they’re color-blind, they don’t notice the difference, it’s a lie. My history is not your history; my culture is not your culture. I don’t want them to be. I’m proud of who I am and where I come from. All I want is to not be the last one rescued in a flood but the first one to wind up in handcuffs.”

Her fingers stiffened in his. “I never—”