“I was jealous of you,” Tess says. “I guess. It’s all so predictable. But she was yours.” The wine bottle is empty. Tess has her feet up on the stool next to her; her arms are wrapped around her shins. She says, “I don’t understand intimacy. I’ll always be pretending. I was jealous of how entitled you all felt to her—like you just knew she would make herself available to you if and when you needed. I probably bitched about it to Martin, but mostly I was just so blood-spittingly jealous. Mostly I just wished that she was mine like that.” Tess doesn’t look at Kate. She wants to tell her the truth, but she can’t do it if she has to remember Kate’s right there. “I was proud, I guess, too, that I had to do everything all on my own. But that didn’t mean I didn’t envy what I thought was the ease all of you had.” She wants to correct this because it’s not quite right. Of course she had help, all sorts. Her parents paid for college and for law school; they loved her, in their way. But she couldn’t talk to either of her sisters without feeling like they were in some competition in which only one of them would make it out alive. The love among them all was complicated, stunted, sometimes painful. She didn’t blame them, but when she saw Martin and his siblings with Helen, she understood how far from that they’d always been. This was not tragic, was the main thing. She’d yearned, she saw now, sometimes in her twenties, to be tragic. But she’d long since lost interest in waiting around to be saved. She won’t say this part out loud to Kate—she’s not quite capable of saying shame out loud. But what she wants Kate to know is that Helen was special. What she wants Kate to know is that, even as Tess and Helen got close over the years they spent together, Helen was not ever, could not ever be, Tess’s mom. There’s something irrevocable about what it must have been to have had that. It’s alive inside of all of them—Martin, Kate, and Henry—something strong and sure and solid that Tess will never have.