Tess grabs one of the stools from the island to climb up and stop the beeping. She grabs at and untwists the fire alarm, but it won’t stop. She pulls at the batteries and takes them out, but that just causes another, slower beep that’s just as loud.

“Fuck,” Tess says, and throws the fire alarm against the wall as well.

The way the rain falls—steady, not quite hail, but cold and close to frozen—Alice has stopped registering it as wet so much as just the way her skin feels now. The snow gives more when they step than it did an hour ago. Shots of cloud and sky pop through the lines of branches, a blank, flat gray that only further brightens up the strips of white along the trees.

They think of the children at the same time. The smoke has spread and thinned, but the smell lingers. The broken pan and pie still splattered on the floor. Tess has hold of Kate’s shoulder but turns her body so she can sneak a look outside. She’s finally gotten the smoke alarm to stop.

The children aren’t there any longer. Tess stands and scans the length of the yard and the garden. The barn lights are off and the rain comes down in sheets and she can’t see where the children are. She hears the cars out front on the highway and she screams the names of both her children and she and Kate run outside without their coats.

Quinn knows that it’s Alice’s house because of those times she’s driven by here. She knows the barn, which looks different from the back than the little bit she saw when she drove by, curling her neck, going slowly—all the curtains kept wide open—thinking it was only fair, when every bit of her life was something Alice had already seen.

Tess and Kate run out to the road as if there wouldn’t have been squeals and screeching, tires, metal, glass, and sirens, as if their own bodies wouldn’t have cracked and broken as soon as the children were hurt, but they’re not there. The street is just a street, with cars driving past, the sound of ice and water splashing under tires. They look up and down in both directions, then run out to the back. They hear them soon enough, but it takes a while to figure out where they are.

“The fucking igloo,” Tess says.

Jamie pins Jack against the snow, and Bea and Colin burrow a hole beneath the inside wall, and Stella, who saw her first, sits cross-legged, face wet, hands in pockets, thrilled that there are now as many girls as there are boys among them, and asks her if she wants to play stinging birds and alicorns.