He holds it above the cake and pauses. “It’s a lovely cake,” he says to Isabelle. “And I bet it tastes good, too. Thank you.”

Isabelle sleeps stretched out on the backseat as they drive home. Ruth falls asleep in front, her hand on Wilson’s leg. Wilson concentrates on the road and as much as is illuminated in the pocket of light the headlights afford. The yellow line curves and straightens, telephone wires belly down and then sweep back up between the poles along the road, snowflakes flash toward them like sparks. It all looks the same along this road; Wilson can’t be sure where between the restaurant and home they are, won’t know until suddenly out of the darkness their house appears, windows lit and warm. And it will appear, he knows, and the thought is comforting—they’ll have a fire, maybe some hot cocoa, maybe Wilson will bring out the slides he has from Africa—but until then, Wilson will keep his eyes on the road.

II

She is sorry. Now she is.

Isabelle lies on her back in the dark. She hangs her head over the bed’s edge and feels her cheek skin sink into her eyes and the veins in her forehead start to bulge. Gravity pulls her lips slightly apart, and her teeth dry in the air. On the ceiling, she has pasted glow-in-the-dark stars in the pattern of an August sky: Cassiopeia, the reclining queen; the Big Dipper, low on the horizon; Cygnus, with his swan wings wide. Orion is shouldering his way into the sky of her ceiling, but his three-starred belt is in another hemisphere, where it is daylight still. He is a winter figure; she knows that if she could see the stars outside tonight, he would be directly overhead. She rolls her eyes toward the window. Her father has left the porch light on for her as a night-light. Snowflakes coast through its glow.

She shifts her focus from the snow outside to the window sash, which her father sanded flat and painted blue after last winter, when they arrived one Friday night and found a squirrel had come down the chimney into Isabelle’s room. Her door had been shut, and the terrified squirrel had chewed at the window sash for three or four days, trying to get out. Isabelle opened the door to her room that night and turned on the light; the squirrel cowered in the corner of the room. The sash was gnawed and bloodstained; the window glass, too, was smeared in blood. Her father had gathered the squirrel up in a bath towel, and Isabelle had offered it milk and nuts. It wouldn’t eat. Her father promised her that in the morning they would take the squirrel to the vet, but by morning it had died.