The children aren’t there any longer. Tess stands and scans the length of the yard and the garden. The barn lights are off and the rain comes down in sheets and she can’t see where the children are. She hears the cars out front on the highway and she screams the names of both her children and she and Kate run outside without their coats.

Quinn knows that it’s Alice’s house because of those times she’s driven by here. She knows the barn, which looks different from the back than the little bit she saw when she drove by, curling her neck, going slowly—all the curtains kept wide open—thinking it was only fair, when every bit of her life was something Alice had already seen.

Tess and Kate run out to the road as if there wouldn’t have been squeals and screeching, tires, metal, glass, and sirens, as if their own bodies wouldn’t have cracked and broken as soon as the children were hurt, but they’re not there. The street is just a street, with cars driving past, the sound of ice and water splashing under tires. They look up and down in both directions, then run out to the back. They hear them soon enough, but it takes a while to figure out where they are.

“The fucking igloo,” Tess says.

Jamie pins Jack against the snow, and Bea and Colin burrow a hole beneath the inside wall, and Stella, who saw her first, sits cross-legged, face wet, hands in pockets, thrilled that there are now as many girls as there are boys among them, and asks her if she wants to play stinging birds and alicorns.

They’re a pile at first, and neither Kate nor Tess sees her. The kids are laughing at them, silly, frantic mothers. We were right here the whole time. Can you believe we all fit inside it? Look, Mom, one of them says. They’re not sure which mom the kids mean.

We found a girl.

She looks cold, but no bone or skin is broken. She looks tired. Her face is red, lips chapped. Resilient, Tess thinks, which is what her favorite teacher called her when she was in law school and which she stopped believing she was long ago.

“Madeleine?” Kate says.

The girl looks up at her, and the kids all stare like they never would have thought to ask her name.

Josh’s igloo has lost half a wall, and the lights are on upstairs, and Alice hears Tess as they come up past the barn. Alice reaches in her pocket for her phone and sees she has ten missed calls from Tess that she must not have felt because her hands and hips are numb.

“She’s here,” Tess yells.

Alice looks at Quinn, not willing to hope yet.

“Madeleine,” says Tess. “Alice, Madeleine is here.”

Alice stands there shocked, her forehead throbbing, afraid that she’ll start crying, and watches Quinn run into the house and up the stairs, and she stays still and listens as Quinn makes a sound unlike any sound Alice has ever heard a person make.