“Dinner, everybody!” Martin calls, going into the room where they’re all playing. He throws one of the twins over his shoulder, and the boy laughs, and Tess watches and is grateful that he’s hers. The kids all tumble after him into the dining room.

“What are we having?” asks Colin.

“Christmas dinner, silly,” Kate says.

“But Grandma Helen isn’t here.”

“Aunt Kate cooked this year,” Tess says, grabbing hold of Stella. “Grandma Helen—”

“We did it together,” Kate interrupts. “Just like Grandma Helen said we should.”

Tess thinks of her first trip down to Florida, how she’d dreaded it for weeks. How she’d asked Martin a thousand different questions about what to bring and wear and how to talk in order that they should like her. How she made him stay in a hotel.

They’re just my family, he kept saying to her. As if that didn’t necessarily portend some sort of altercation, as if that were a word filled with something sturdy, nourishing, instead of what she knew.

Her clothes had felt too fancy. Her shirt was silk, and it had wrinkled, and she’d sweated through the armpits. Helen had taken her aside and asked her about work, and she had tried hard to figure out the sort of answers that might most please her. Helen touched her three times, a hug when she arrived that Tess had accidentally dodged and then stiffened under, apologetic, moving unthinkingly away—Helen laughing at her a few years later; You were like some feral cat, she said—she’d touched her arm while they talked, telling her something that Tess had realized a beat too late was meant to be funny. Tess had told her about the pro bono work the firm did, about the cases she took on that she thought Helen might think meant she was good enough for Martin. Even as she knew she wasn’t, felt so sure she was too cold and broken to be folded in with all of them. But Helen didn’t seem to be testing her so much as she seemed interested. She wore you down with all the talking, until you were too tired, until you just answered what you thought instead of what you thought she might want. The third time Helen touched Tess she had hugged her as she and Martin left, and Tess had felt the most prepared, looser from three glasses of wine and all the food, glad for all the ways the night had been easier than she’d feared, grateful for how it had felt like a way of being in the world she’d never known before.