She wonders when and how to ask if Alice plans to tell on her. To tell on her, like they’re all children, tattling, like they’re all at the mercy of authorities larger, more nefarious than they are. She thinks Alice won’t, but also, she wants to be sure. She wants to take Alice aside in some hallway of this big old house and make her promise that this secret will stay theirs. When she left her mother’s house and went out on her own, she thought she’d find other people, better than the ones that she was born with, but that had proven harder than she’d hoped. What were the rules for loving people who were not obliged to love you? How did you know when and how to trust they wouldn’t destroy you too? She needs Alice to trust her now. She needs Alice to break the rules for her. Alice has, already, not called the cops, as Quinn asked her not to do. She thinks maybe this means that she’ll protect her. She needs to think how to remind her that this is protecting Maddie too. How to ask her, though, how to make sure she remembers, make sure she won’t later hold all this against her, how to make sure that they stay always, her and Maddie, but also Alice, just as safe and warm as they are right now?

After dinner, Tess unpacks the pies into pans as if Kate might forget they aren’t homemade. Henry comes into the kitchen and catches her. “I’m making gin drinks for the adults,” he says. “A fucking day, huh?”

“A fucking year,” she says. She keeps thinking their lives will settle, somehow, into something they might not have ever been. She keeps thinking that the ache of Helen not there won’t be quite so constant or so sharp after a while.

Henry nods and looks past her to the dining room, where someone laughs and a fork clatters against a plate, glass clinks. “You think she’s okay?” he says. Tess knows he means Alice.

“I think she will be,” she says. Though she has no idea.

“That girl,” he says.

“It worked out okay,” says Tess, not wanting to talk about the ways they are now implicated.

Henry nods. “I guess it did.”

Tess grabs his wrist, looks at him. “It’s fine,” she says. “If you think we should let them have the house, who gives a fuck: it’s fine.”

“I’m not sure the two of us can just say that.”

“I’m the bad one, the cold, withholding holdout,” she says. “We can put them on a payment plan.”

“You’re sure, though? I mean . . . I know Alice doesn’t care.”

“I’ll get something drawn up. They can pay the four of us a mortgage. There’s a way to do it so we all still benefit.”