Inside her mittens, her hands are tight little fists, her fingernails dug deep into her palms. She reminds herself to breathe, and it is all she can do to walk to the back door and out into the snowy cold again.

She shuts the inner door firmly but quietly behind her. The screen door hisses shut on its hydraulic spring. She is embarrassed to have had to leave, especially when she considers what they must be saying about her right now inside—how are her parents explaining her rudeness?—but she hadn’t known what else to do. And now that she’s standing out here, she still doesn’t know what to do. She has been outdoors for hours, and she is cold, and tired of being cold.

On the driveway below her, their tree is on its side, and the sight of it fills her with a dismay that she can’t explain, but it is powerful enough to bring her to tears. Just minutes ago, she and her father were bringing that tree home, and she had been in a good mood, and just like that everything has changed, and really, she has no one to blame but herself. She tries to resummon her anger toward her mother—it is easier than sadness—but she cannot. Because really, what is wrong with her mother inviting the Dunlaps over? Why shouldn’t she, even if it seems to Isabelle a transparent move, designed to get Isabelle to engage? But maybe it wasn’t that at all. Maybe her mother had really just been driving by, and maybe the Dunlaps had reminded her of her father and herself, the way they used to be, the way she’s made it impossible to be anymore. And maybe just to be polite her mother had asked them in for cocoa. What right does Isabelle have to be angry about that? And worse, what right does she have not to speak when Thomas Dunlap really can’t? What must Mr. Dunlap think of her, with her self-imposed affliction, when his own boy cannot escape his world of silence?

She hurries across the driveway to the car. She locks herself inside, small in the driver’s seat, which she imagines still holds the heat from her mother’s body. There is still a trace of warmth in the car, and the smell of pine needles from the wreaths mingles with her mother’s smell, at once indescribable and utterly familiar, and this, like the sight of the tree outside, fills her with a ragged sadness. She lowers her head onto the steering wheel, accidentally sounding the horn, and abruptly, startled by the sound, she sits back.