The girl’s lips are chapped and her skin is sharp with cold, still. She’s not said much but she stares at Tess. Tess fixes her eyes on the girl’s bright red, tightly fisted hands and grabs hold of them with both of hers. My mom, she said once, and then a second time, while they were outside. Can you please call my mom?

The mother is a child, Tess thinks, as she steps back, as the mother-girl barrels past her and holds her daughter. She brings in snow on the boots that she still wears, the wind and wet from outside and the cold. Her face and head and pants are wet, and Tess looks behind her, toward the door, for Alice, aware she’s accidentally witnessing a thing that they shouldn’t have to share.

Alice unwinds her scarf as she walks slowly into the house. It’s soaked through with blood. The bones in her hands are fiery with cold. She doesn’t want to see Maddie before the force of wanting to hug her has lightened enough that she can see her and not grab hold of her.

“What’s happening?” Bea says.

“Who yelled?” asks Stella.

“It’s fine, ducks,” Kate says. “That was Madeleine’s mom.”

“She looks like a teenager,” says Colin.

“She’s not,” Kate says, though she’s not sure.

“Teenagers can have kids,” says Stella, and Kate goes to the stove to get her sweet potatoes boiling so as not to have to answer whichever questions come next. Upstairs, she hears what she imagines is the mother scream again. Alice looked pale and lightheaded, wet and worn out, and now, after Kate finds another bag of potato chips in the pantry and hands it to the children, she goes in search of her.

She catches Alice by the stairs, holding a scarf covered in blood, and Kate’s been a mother just long enough not to gasp but grabs her arm.

“What happened?” she says, and Alice points up to her head. It’s deep but clotted, Kate sees. The skin around the gash is bruised and also bloody but, she says to Alice, still holding her arm, “I think you’ll make it through.”

She helps Alice slip out of her wet coat and pull a towel around her. “You need to strip down,” she says, pulling her through her own house toward the fire. She leaves Alice there while she goes down to the dryer in the basement, where earlier she saw a pair of Henry’s sweatpants, and when she comes back Alice slips out of her pants and into Henry’s, into one of Kate’s sweaters from the back of the couch.

Alice hears them up there: Quinn crying, Maddie’s voice, no words that Alice can make out.