The kids all eat their breakfast, hardly talking. Tess keeps looking outside toward the woods, the barn, the street, where cars are coming one after the other. She looks at Kate, who looks at the children, down at her plate, her inert phone.

The sun is rising higher in the air when Josh, Henry, Martin, and Alice all file out of the truck. Quinn comes toward them. She looks small and young. Alice is twenty years her senior; Alice could, in fact, be Quinn’s mother. She wants to help her, make all of it better. Also, though, she wants to hold her by her shoulders and scream in her face, What did you do?

“It’s okay,” she says, as Quinn crumples into her. “We’ll find her.” She feels the men’s eyes on her, wondering, she thinks, why she’d make this promise. Why she’d say this thing that might turn out not to be true.

Quinn stiffens and backs away. “She took her coat,” she says. She’s stopped crying and is staring, clear-eyed, at Alice, eyes darting briefly to the men. “I thought for the first few hours that she had her phone. I have it, though. She left it here.”

Alice keeps her eyes toward the floor, thinking briefly, shamefacedly, of all the texts she’s sent.

Tess and Kate bundle the children up and take them outside. Tess is terrible at this part of parenting, the less clear, less structured parts: going outside to have fun. The boys immediately begin to fight, something about a shovel someone’s found that they all want to use, and Tess feels unmoored, unsure how to referee or who to take aside to talk to sternly, but Kate calls to them all that she has come up with a game: the older kids can be the sled dogs, she will be the sled; Jamie and Jack can be the drivers and ride on her back. Of course, the boys want to be dogs as well, and all five children mush and trudge on through the snow, howling and barking, happy, and Tess watches the strength and heft of Kate’s body, the way she bounds through the snow and the kids pile on her, and thinks she seems so much more capable, more powerful than Tess has ever been.

Quinn thinks, for the first time in a million years, that maybe she should have called her mother. These people cannot help her. She thinks of all the times she’s opened up her phone and scrolled in search of someone who might help.