I Don’t Know How to Tell You This

In the courtroom in Manhattan where Rachel presides, she is chairman and chief operating officer and usually treated with the sort of deference that could lead to something of a swelled head if she isn’t careful. Outside her courtroom, though, without those judicial robes and their billowed sleeves, she is just a woman, no longer a spring chicken or even middle-aged—but still hardworking and well-meaning, and relatively cool when dressed in her best pair of black jeans and ankle-high, pointy-toed black boots.

En route to court this morning, a week before she and her husband Jonathan are off to celebrate their forty-fifth wedding anniversary with a brief vacation in Paris, Rachel makes her first mistake of the day, which is to stare in horror at the bland-looking teenager beside her on the subway platform who is flaunting a T-shirt that says bluntly, in fluorescent-yellow letters:

MY HEART IS FILLED WITH NOTHING BUT HATE

“Gotta problem?” the kid, red-haired and hazel-eyed, growls at her, and it occurs to Rachel a moment later that he is somebody’s son, maybe even someone’s beloved son, and yet it’s impossible to know how he arrived at this place in his life, seventeen or eighteen years old, brimming with hate and apparently proud of it.