When all the kids are in their holiday pajamas, Tess will turn on an especially long movie and help chop things for Kate while they split a bottle of wine and pretend to like each other more than they do. Tess will try very hard not to bring up the house. As soon as they find this missing girl—because Tess has chosen to believe completely that this girl will be found—they’ll all celebrate and toast each other, toast the small ways they can still care for and love one another, no matter how awful at it all of them are.

Alice can’t think of what to ask Quinn. What were you thinking will not work, nor will it help find Maddie. She’ll be okay, she wants to say, but can’t.

“I shouldn’t be allowed to be a mother,” Quinn says. “They were probably right to take her from me when they did.”

“She loves you,” Alice says.

“Why’d she leave, then?”

Alice has no answer for that. She looks straight ahead and tries to visualize what finding Maddie will feel like. She tries imagining the feel of Maddie close to her again.

“I love her,” Quinn says, and now Alice sees that Quinn is crying. “She’s all I have.”

Alice thinks that she should pull her to her, that she should hold her arms and tell her that they’ll find her, but she doesn’t. They’re all implicated, Alice thinks, in whatever happens to Maddie now.

Up close, Tess likes Kate’s children better. Colin has so much fun, really, when his cousins are around. Stella gets annoyed with Bea and comes to sit with her. She’s too big to sit on Tess’s lap, but Tess pulls her up. Their coats swish and smush as Stella settles in.

“What’s happening?” Stella whispers.

“It’s almost Christmas,” Tess says. “We’re all together.”

“But something’s happening. Daddy and Uncle Henry left because something’s wrong.”

Colin falls, and both twins pile over top of him. Close by, the igloo sits untouched. Tess considers daring the boys to try and push it over, cave it in.

“Boys,” she calls instead, not loud enough.

“You were asleep?” Alice says. “When she left?”

“I never—” Quinn starts. Then she stops, pauses. “I left,” she says, not looking at Alice. “I put her to bed; she reads all night. I went out for half an hour.”

Alice clenches both fists in the pockets of her coat.

“I was—” Quinn says. “She had that phone.”

Maddie was one of Alice’s first cases. Quinn had just been hospitalized, Maddie had just been removed from the home. She was living in a foster home, and the first time she met Alice she told her a joke: Why should you never play cards in the jungle?

I don’t know, Alice answered.

Too many cheetahs, Maddie said.

Alice had laughed out loud.