The whole time Tess has known her—even in the time when she lost each of the babies, when Tess brought her gin and chocolate—she’s always thought of Alice as stronger than the rest of them. Alice has seemed impenetrable to Tess, beautiful and brilliant and also immune from all the petty things that madden Tess. Of course this cannot be true; whatever Alice feels, whatever she is not, in fact, immune to, Tess just figures she must share those things with Henry, though sometimes Tess wonders if Alice keeps it to herself. That is, mostly, what Tess does. Except, she thinks, what she’s held all these years, it comes out regardless. She worries about its weight and sharpness. She thinks about her mother’s hands holding her foot, both her sisters sleeping separately in their rooms, the cut and sting, the popping up of blood. She thinks next week she’ll call Alice. Maybe, once the kids are back in school, she’ll ditch work early and come up with gin and chocolate.

No one tells the children that they have to eat a vegetable. Jack is strangely obsessed with the spinach casserole and has four servings, and Colin finishes his fifth roll. Stella’s always had a sensitivity to textures and picks slowly at a piece of turkey. She lumps the potatoes and the casserole into their own separate square-shaped mounds and presses on them with her index finger, and no one tells her to stop playing with her food.

They’re all so dressed up, Quinn thinks. The boys are wearing bow ties, and the girls have matching dresses. Quinn has never fully understood this, even though her mother used to do it too: to put on nice clothes, to sit here with the same people that you sit with every day, as if it made you better, proved something about the value or the sanctity of this meal that you had together, which really was mostly just like all the other meals. Quinn thinks it’s silly, really, except she likes the way the shape of the room has shifted, the way the candles make all of them look looser, warmer, better somehow than they did before.

She wonders when and how to ask if Alice plans to tell on her. To tell on her, like they’re all children, tattling, like they’re all at the mercy of authorities larger, more nefarious than they are. She thinks Alice won’t, but also, she wants to be sure. She wants to take Alice aside in some hallway of this big old house and make her promise that this secret will stay theirs. When she left her mother’s house and went out on her own, she thought she’d find other people, better than the ones that she was born with, but that had proven harder than she’d hoped. What were the rules for loving people who were not obliged to love you? How did you know when and how to trust they wouldn’t destroy you too? She needs Alice to trust her now. She needs Alice to break the rules for her. Alice has, already, not called the cops, as Quinn asked her not to do. She thinks maybe this means that she’ll protect her. She needs to think how to remind her that this is protecting Maddie too. How to ask her, though, how to make sure she remembers, make sure she won’t later hold all this against her, how to make sure that they stay always, her and Maddie, but also Alice, just as safe and warm as they are right now?