Colin bounds through the room. He brushes up against the tree, and the branches rustle, and she reaches out to grab and hug him.

“Hi, Aunt Kate,” he mutters.

She brushes her head briefly against his. He’s only two years older than her boys but is fully a foot taller. His face, stark beneath his tight-cropped hair, looks so much more formed than theirs.

“Where’s Bea?” he says.

She nods toward the stairs.

“So big,” she whispers, though he’s gone already when she says this. She adores her nephew. His conversation is more grown up than her kids’; when he hugs her, he hugs longer and tighter, lets her breathe him in as often and as long as she wants. Though he can also be intense, intractable, can get frighteningly excited—he often drives Josh nuts.

She hears Tess laugh in the other room and feels the sides of her jaw tighten at the prospect of her quiet judgment, the way she always seems so sure she knows what’s best. All Kate wants is a nice Christmas for the children, a few pictures, to not think only about how her mom being gone makes her feel sad and scared and like maybe she’s being suffocated slowly, like she’s falling from some high-up, cracked and broken cliff. They have to talk about the house, and Kate does not want to talk about it. She wants her brothers to look at her and see she needs it, to intuit, without her and Josh having to admit it, that they are running out of money. She wants them to feel somehow that she’s not happy in Virginia—she no longer remembers why she thought she’d like living in Virginia—to suggest, without her having to ask, that she and her family take the place until her kids are grown and gone. This will not happen, of course. Not least because of Tess.

The tree, though, is nearly perfect. Kate has spaced almost all the ornaments the way her mother taught her. She strung the lights up first, and they loop up in a pleasing, bright white curve. There is the proper balance of the homemade and the store-bought, these truly awful bells she got for her mother at a school sale, ceramic, too white, with tiny bright red balls inside that no longer make much noise. She sees, has seen for years, that her mother kept them only not to hurt her feelings. Kate touches one of the clay angels that were her mother’s favorite: not too big, intricately painted, passed down from Kate’s grandmother. Up close, she sees one of its wings has broken, chipped off. She runs her thumb along the spot where it’s missing, blank beige and sharp along the edges; she feels, all of a sudden, as if the tears might finally come.