She hears Maddie declare something and watches as the other children listen to her and she almost starts crying. She watches Alice through the opening to the kitchen. Alice seems not to want to look at Quinn or Maddie. She touched Maddie once, an awkward one-armed hug while Quinn stood close by. She whispered to her, quickly, calmly. She saw Maddie whisper back. She wonders now about what each of them said. She thinks of what Alice looked like with that blood on her face, all those babies that she didn’t have, her wanting and not getting. How that might be why she didn’t tell on her, why, maybe, she won’t.

“You warm enough?”

Quinn jumps. Tess, Quinn thinks. She keeps forgetting. The woman stands up so straight it makes Quinn try to sit up straighter too. “Yeah,” she says. “I’m good.”

Quinn pulls her feet up underneath her on the couch, then stretches them back out, apologetic. She fists and unfists her hands. She hopes this woman will go back into the kitchen with the other women, leave her here alone with the kids. Tess seems to consider sitting, but instead takes the crumpled blanket off the couch and folds it. “Let us know,” she says, “if you need anything at all.”

“How is she?” Kate asks.

“She’s so young,” Tess says.

“She’s twenty-three,” says Alice.

“I couldn’t do shit when I was twenty-three,” Tess says.

Alice and Kate look at one another. Tess was editor of the law review then.

Tess waves a hand in the air: It’s not the same. “I lived off canned tuna and frozen corn,” she says. “I mixed it every night with ranch dressing. I could not have kept another person alive.”

“She hasn’t had an easy time,” says Alice. What Alice doesn’t tell them is the way Quinn looked the first time she met her: young and desperate, sorry. She’d been discharged already, but Maddie was with the foster family, and Quinn sat mostly quiet on the couch in their dark condo by herself. Alice introduced herself at the front door. Quinn had nodded, let her in. It was intimate, what she did. It was alienating, the way Alice was meant to monitor, to make choices about whether or not she thought Quinn was fit. She thought sometimes, secretly, as she walked around people’s apartments, peeked into their refrigerators, noted the cleanliness of their floors and bathrooms, how her own body had proven her not up to the task of parenthood.

“I can show you Maddie’s room,” Quinn said, after a while of not much talking. She was the manager at a local restaurant but was looking for something in the daytime, more aligned with Maddie’s schedule. A few weeks later, Alice would help her find a job at the front desk of a law office. Quinn’s still there.