After dinner, Tess unpacks the pies into pans as if Kate might forget they aren’t homemade. Henry comes into the kitchen and catches her. “I’m making gin drinks for the adults,” he says. “A fucking day, huh?”

“A fucking year,” she says. She keeps thinking their lives will settle, somehow, into something they might not have ever been. She keeps thinking that the ache of Helen not there won’t be quite so constant or so sharp after a while.

Henry nods and looks past her to the dining room, where someone laughs and a fork clatters against a plate, glass clinks. “You think she’s okay?” he says. Tess knows he means Alice.

“I think she will be,” she says. Though she has no idea.

“That girl,” he says.

“It worked out okay,” says Tess, not wanting to talk about the ways they are now implicated.

Henry nods. “I guess it did.”

Tess grabs his wrist, looks at him. “It’s fine,” she says. “If you think we should let them have the house, who gives a fuck: it’s fine.”

“I’m not sure the two of us can just say that.”

“I’m the bad one, the cold, withholding holdout,” she says. “We can put them on a payment plan.”

“You’re sure, though? I mean . . . I know Alice doesn’t care.”

“I’ll get something drawn up. They can pay the four of us a mortgage. There’s a way to do it so we all still benefit.”

Henry looks at her, and Tess has to look past him. “You’re not bad,” he says.

“I still wish it wasn’t fucking Josh.”

They both laugh, and Henry hands her two of the drinks and leads her back out of the kitchen. “We’ll put Bea and the boys in charge of the snail kites.”

They go back into the dining room, and Tess and Henry pass out the drinks, and all the grown-ups thank them. The kids watch them. Quinn is meant to be a sober person, Alice has told Henry, and is not handed a glass.

Tess goes back in the kitchen and brings out the pie. Josh mans the whipped cream, sneaking spoonsful into the mouths of all the children, who laugh, talk with massive mounds of cream still in their mouths, spill on their dresses and their ties. Kate has not yet gotten her picture, but she laughs the loudest, watching them.

“My dress is dirty,” Bea says, sorry.

“It’s fine, duck,” Kate says, wetting her napkin. “It’s all completely fine.”

“Another toast?” says Martin.

“To Mom,” Kate says.

“To Mom,” her brothers agree, looking back at her.

“To Grandma,” Stella says, and raises her glass and clinks it against Colin’s. The kids all cheer, including Maddie. Quinn smiles, eyes still on her daughter, hands still in her lap.

“Let’s go out to the barn,” Alice says after dessert, bits of pie piled on plates and whipped cream spread across Kate’s cloth napkins, cranberry and gravy stains on the tablecloth that she brought back from Helen’s house, and Henry looks at Alice, and she smiles.