They’re a pile at first, and neither Kate nor Tess sees her. The kids are laughing at them, silly, frantic mothers. We were right here the whole time. Can you believe we all fit inside it? Look, Mom, one of them says. They’re not sure which mom the kids mean.

We found a girl.

She looks cold, but no bone or skin is broken. She looks tired. Her face is red, lips chapped. Resilient, Tess thinks, which is what her favorite teacher called her when she was in law school and which she stopped believing she was long ago.

“Madeleine?” Kate says.

The girl looks up at her, and the kids all stare like they never would have thought to ask her name.

Josh’s igloo has lost half a wall, and the lights are on upstairs, and Alice hears Tess as they come up past the barn. Alice reaches in her pocket for her phone and sees she has ten missed calls from Tess that she must not have felt because her hands and hips are numb.

“She’s here,” Tess yells.

Alice looks at Quinn, not willing to hope yet.

“Madeleine,” says Tess. “Alice, Madeleine is here.”

Alice stands there shocked, her forehead throbbing, afraid that she’ll start crying, and watches Quinn run into the house and up the stairs, and she stays still and listens as Quinn makes a sound unlike any sound Alice has ever heard a person make.

The Birds

The men trudge back toward their cars, embarrassed. Of course they’re glad the girl’s been found but they each lament in their own way that they weren’t the ones to find her. Henry’s careful, driving through the sheets of rain that’s begun to turn to snow. He leans forward, shoulders clenched and hands tight around the wheel—even Josh isn’t talking. His headlights glint off the wet and fog, and he can hardly see.

Inside the house, Kate stripped Maddie down in front of the space heater in the bathroom and wrapped her up in towels and warm blankets. Tess googled frostbite, hypothermia; the Mayo Clinic warned against the shock of hot water or a heating pad. Kate got the girl a glass of water, found chips and fruit, and Tess rubbed her arms up and down over the blankets that they’d draped over her arms. She seemed both more and less strong than any of the other children. Her limbs are leaner but they look better held together, hard and firm. She looked straight at them in the bright light of the bathroom, and both Kate and Tess had to work hard to look straight back.

Kate left Tess with Maddie and ushered the other children into her room. She stripped them down, too, dried them off with towels. She found them fresh clothes and brought them downstairs with the promise of more food.