With Quinn, it’s been less easy—Quinn, who clearly loves her child but seems sometimes ill-equipped, so young. Alice knows that there is no father in the picture, that Quinn is not in contact with her family. She knows how very lonely, even with Maddie, Quinn must be. How very lonely—even having Henry, her mother calling, Tess texting, so much more time and space and safety—Alice has been too.

She thinks: if it were her, if Maddie were hers, she would never have left her by herself.

The twins are squealing and yelling, and Tess can’t see Colin anymore beneath the snow. She sets Stella down and tries not to run or yell as she pulls them off and lifts Colin out from under them.

“Stop it,” he says, angry.

“You can’t be in the snow like that.”

“We’re playing.”

“Play something else.”

“Bitch,” her son whispers. The twins both titter, shocked, their faces at first thrilled, then, as she stares at them, red and still.

She turns back to her son, grabs his face and holds it close to hers. He looks scared and she whispers to him: “Just know whatever you put into the world you can’t take back.”

The town is a single street, and many of the shops are closed. Alice doesn’t spend much time here. There are four antique shops, a coffee shop, a restaurant she’s never been inside with a purple sign and a poor approximation of vines that she thinks are meant to suggest Italy. There’s snow, hard and gray and stepped in, packed against the curbs and on the edges of the sidewalk. In summer, the place fills up with tourists from the city and there’s another restaurant, with a small porch built onto the sidewalk, that serves passable omelets and frittatas and has a line out the door from April until after the first snow. It’s all empty now, most of the shops closed. They pass the only bar: the flash of TV through the dark window, the smell of cigarettes and beer.

They walk another block and pass the gas station and are already mostly out of town. The elementary school is another block up a steep hill, and the plan is to check the yard behind it; behind that is a graveyard and then acres of parks that they’ll trudge through toward Alice’s. The terrain back there is rocky and uneven, ridges that jut up and out. When Alice and Henry have gone for hikes, they’ve had to take breaks, find sticks to reallocate their weight and steady themselves on their way down. Maddie’s sturdy, though, and her center of gravity is lower. Both Alice and Henry are tall.