Quinn speeds up with her. If she doesn’t speed up just like Alice, if they don’t keep hold of one another, she, maybe both of them, will fall again.

They smell the smoke before they see it. They’ve been so busy keeping one eye on the children as they’re talking, they forgot to keep an eye on the stove. Kate had meant to check it every ten minutes; she doesn’t know this oven. Her dough is particular, specific.

The fire alarm goes off, and they’re both up. The smell of burning is strong all of a sudden, sharp and acrid. They both run to the stove, and Kate reaches in to grab the pie without a hot pad. She burns her palms and fingers and the pan clanks against the counter, the crust already black and crisp.

“Fuck,” Kate says. “Fuck. Fuck.”

Tess looks at her, then at the pie, which seems now to be crisping further.

“Fuck,” Kate says again. She starts to cry. It was, of course, Helen’s recipe. The apples she chose specially from their farmers’ market in Virginia, half sweet, half tart. She peeled all of them herself, only letting Tess and the children chop. When she ran her hands through the sugar and the butter, mixing, adding the corn starch Helen always recommended, she’d felt better than she had in weeks or months.

The alarm has not stopped beeping. Her hands shake, red and hot. She picks up the pie—the glass still hot, all those apples heavy in the pan. She throws it, hard and heavy, far across the room. The apples splat against the floor and wall and bits of juice spread across one of the cabinets. The glass is thick and clunks hard on the floor before it cracks.

Tess grabs one of the stools from the island to climb up and stop the beeping. She grabs at and untwists the fire alarm, but it won’t stop. She pulls at the batteries and takes them out, but that just causes another, slower beep that’s just as loud.

“Fuck,” Tess says, and throws the fire alarm against the wall as well.

The way the rain falls—steady, not quite hail, but cold and close to frozen—Alice has stopped registering it as wet so much as just the way her skin feels now. The snow gives more when they step than it did an hour ago. Shots of cloud and sky pop through the lines of branches, a blank, flat gray that only further brightens up the strips of white along the trees.

They think of the children at the same time. The smoke has spread and thinned, but the smell lingers. The broken pan and pie still splattered on the floor. Tess has hold of Kate’s shoulder but turns her body so she can sneak a look outside. She’s finally gotten the smoke alarm to stop.