AFTER THE FUNERAL, everyone comes back to the house. There are casseroles and pies and platters, none of which I eat. People keep telling me they’re sorry for our loss, as if they had something to do with it. Francis and Tom sit outside on the porch, which still has some shards of glass on it from my window project, and drink the bottle of whiskey Tom’s brought.

Brit sits on a couch like the middle of a flower, surrounded by the petals of her friends. When someone she doesn’t know well comes too near, they close around her. Eventually, they leave, saying things like Call me if you need me and Every day it’ll get a little easier. In other words: lies.

I am just walking the last guest out when a car pulls up. The door opens, and MacDougall, the cop who took my complaint, gets out. He walks up the steps to where I am standing, his hands in his pockets. “I don’t have any information for you yet,” he says bluntly. “I came to pay my respects.”

I feel Brit come up behind me like a shadow. “Babe, this is the officer who’s going to help us.”

“When?” she asks.

“Well, ma’am, investigations into these things take time…”

“These things,” Brit repeats. “These things.” She shoves past me, so that she is toe-to-toe with the cop. “My son is not a thing. Was,” she corrects, her voice snagging. “Was not a thing.”

Then she turns on her heel and disappears into the belly of the house. I look at the cop. “It’s been a tough day.”

“I understand. As soon as the prosecutor contacts me I’ll be in—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, however, before the sound of a crash fills all the space behind me. “I have to go,” I tell him, but I’m already closing the door in his face.

There’s another crash before I reach the kitchen. As soon as I step inside, a casserole dish flies by my face, striking the wall behind me. “Brit,” I cry out, moving toward her, and she wings a glass at my head. It glances off my brow, and for a moment, I see stars.

“Is this supposed to make me feel better?” Brit screams. “I fucking hate mac and cheese.”

“Baby.” I grasp her by the shoulders. “They were trying to be nice.”

“I don’t want them to be nice,” she says, tears streaming down her face now. “I don’t want their pity. I don’t want anything, except that bitch who killed my baby.”

I fold my arms around her, even though she stays stiff in them. “This isn’t over yet.”

She shoves at me so hard and so unexpectedly that I stumble backward. “It should be,” she says, with so much venom in her words that I am paralyzed. “It would be, if you were a real man.”

A muscle ticks in my jaw and I ball my hands into fists, but I don’t react. Francis, who’s entered the room at some point, comes up behind Brit and slips an arm around her waist. “Come on now, ladybug. Let’s get you upstairs.” He leads her out of the kitchen.

I know what she’s saying: that a warrior isn’t much of a warrior when he’s fighting behind a computer. True, going underground with our movement was Francis’s idea, and it’s been a brilliant and insidious plan—but Brit’s right. There’s a big difference between the instant gratification that comes from landing a punch and the delayed pride that comes from spreading fear through the Internet.

I grab the car keys off the kitchen counter, and a moment later I’m cruising downtown, near the railroad tracks. I think, for a heartbeat, about finding that black nurse’s address. I have the technological expertise to do it in less than two minutes.

Which is about as long as it would take the cops to point a finger at me if anything happened to her or her property.

Instead, I park under a railroad overpass and get out of the car. My heart’s pounding, my adrenaline is high. It’s been so long since I’ve been wilding that I’ve forgotten the high of it, unlike anything that alcohol or sports or even falling in love can produce.

The first person that gets in my way is unconscious. Homeless, he’s drunk or drugged or asleep on a cardboard pallet under a mountain of plastic bags. He’s not even black. He’s just…easy.

I grab him by the throat, and he startles from one nightmare into another. “What are you looking at?” I scream into his face, even though I have him pinned by the neck, so that he couldn’t be looking at anything but me. “What the fuck is your problem?”

Then I head-butt him in the mouth, so that I knock his teeth loose. I throw him back on the pavement, hearing a satisfying crack as his skull meets the ground.

With every blow, I can breathe a little easier. It has been years since I did this, but it feels like yesterday—my fists have a muscle memory. I pound this stranger into someone who will never be recognized, since it’s the only way to remember who I am.