Despite the cold, Wilson is sweating underneath his layers by the time he’s dragged the tree he and Isabelle have cut down through the woods all the way back to the house, which is no short distance. Isabelle was particular about their tree, circling each one Wilson suggested so as to view it from every angle, shaking her head no before trudging on deeper into the woods to find another, more suitable tree. But Wilson doesn’t mind. Good exercise, he figures, not to mention that Isabelle hasn’t seemed more herself in some time, which is an especially welcome contrast to her mood this morning, which just about set Wilson over the edge of desperation. Maybe they don’t need to go as far away as Africa, he thinks; maybe they should just hunker down up here for the rest of the month. A few more days like this one, and he can see Isabelle talking again, or forgetting not to. That’s what it was, he thinks; both of them had been so intent on their search for a tree that they’d forgotten to fixate on her silence.

“Phew!” he says, releasing his grip on the trunk and letting the tree bounce down onto the packed snow of the driveway. “New tradition, don’t you think?” He pulls his hat off and looks at his daughter, who is surveying the tree with her hands on her hips. She nods without looking at him.

Wilson sniffs. Ruth is home, he notes, and just beneath the hood the car’s engine still clicks and purrs. “I wonder what your mother will think.”

Isabelle gives him a skeptical look. He grins.

They climb up the back steps and bang the snow from their boots on the threshold. Wilson opens the door. “After you,” he says, and follows his daughter inside, singing a version of the tune they’d marched home to: “Hi ho, hi ho, we’ve drug a tree home through the snow!”—but he stops short when they turn the corner into the kitchen and find that Ruth is not alone.

On stools across the island from where Ruth is dumping cocoa into mugs sit a man and a boy, each a different-size version of the other, both of them as red and wet with cold as Wilson and Isabelle are themselves.

Ruth smiles. “Hello,” she says.

Wilson looks from his wife to his daughter, whose face seems to have turned to stone, her eyes gone glassy and doll-like, as if the lids would click shut if someone were to lift Isabelle and set her supine. He sets his jaw and manages a smile. “Hi,” he says. He straightens up and runs a hand through his hair, which he knows must be at all angles, mussed by static and sweat. He extends his hand toward the man, who has risen from his stool. “Wilson Carter,” he says. “And this is Isabelle.”