She catches Alice by the stairs, holding a scarf covered in blood, and Kate’s been a mother just long enough not to gasp but grabs her arm.

“What happened?” she says, and Alice points up to her head. It’s deep but clotted, Kate sees. The skin around the gash is bruised and also bloody but, she says to Alice, still holding her arm, “I think you’ll make it through.”

She helps Alice slip out of her wet coat and pull a towel around her. “You need to strip down,” she says, pulling her through her own house toward the fire. She leaves Alice there while she goes down to the dryer in the basement, where earlier she saw a pair of Henry’s sweatpants, and when she comes back Alice slips out of her pants and into Henry’s, into one of Kate’s sweaters from the back of the couch.

Alice hears them up there: Quinn crying, Maddie’s voice, no words that Alice can make out.

“Can you grab me the hydrogen peroxide from the bathroom?” Kate calls to Tess. She sits Alice down cross-legged by the fire. Tess brings cotton balls, too, and Alice watches Kate work, cleaning, careful. Alice hears the kids come out of the kitchen, watching, asking questions. She can’t turn her head to look at them; Kate is holding her chin firmly as she works on her.

“She’s okay,” Tess says to the children. “Aunt Kate, your mom, is taking care of her.”

Quinn isn’t cold any longer. Her hands are warm from holding Maddie, from helping her get dressed, but also somehow still cold, hard and aching, in the bones. Tess swept through with dry clothes for both of them, so many towels. She’s wearing what she thinks might be Alice’s pants now, a long sweater. Alice gave her a pair of underwear that still had the tag on.

Quinn thinks, still holding on to Maddie, that she’ll have to ask Alice to let her keep her. She can’t imagine anything so perfect as her daughter—her pink, flushed skin, her hands. She wants to sweep her up and hold her, to take her home and fold her into bed with her and not ever let her out. But instead they go downstairs, and Maddie breaks free of her and starts playing with the other children. She’s wearing one of the other girls’ clothes—Quinn can’t remember which one, can’t quite place their names, though she was told. They’ve asked them to stay for dinner, though Quinn wants to run, to pack Maddie in a car—whichever of those lined up in the driveway is parked closest to the road—just like she did that day her mother caught her using, to drive and drive until it’s just the two of them for good. She thinks, first, she’ll stay and let these people feed them, let Maddie sit in this warm house until they’re both steady enough to go.