He wraps his arm around her waist and brings his lips close to her cheek. He has a three-day beard, almost always. His eyes are, like his mother’s and his brother’s and his sister’s, a light, yellow-flecked brown. Alice doesn’t flinch or pull away, though that’s her impulse. She’s not sure she remembers the last time their bodies touched like this.

“They haven’t even started to talk about the house.”

“You scared of Tess?” he says.

“Absolutely. Both of them.”

He loosens his grip, and she steps farther from him. She always wanted to be a woman who was friends with other women, but it didn’t take. She tried to have female friends, but women never seemed to want to trust her, regardless of what she did or said. She had no siblings, no sisters to show her what it was like. And boys always liked her; it took her a long time to realize all the ways this made it harder for her with girls. Now, where they live, up in the woods, she often goes weeks without being looked at the way she used to be. She doesn’t mind this, kind of likes it. She’d hoped, at her new job, to make more female friends, but the women there are older, all white. In her whole life Alice has only had two close Black female friends; both of them live far away and are that specific always busy that comes with little kids. Her colleagues are cordial to her during working hours, though when she sees them around town and smiles at them, they often do not smile back. Tess was almost her friend, when they lived in the city. But she’s different, less accessible, when they’re all mixed up like this.

“Seriously,” she says to Henry. “You cannot leave me with them.”

“I want to finish so the kids can see it,” he says.

“They won’t get it,” she says, just to hurt him. The ease with which he leaves her, the ease with which he continues to believe his work has worth: she feels both anger toward him and a not-small amount of shame on his behalf.

“It’s birds,” he says, inured to her. “What’s not to get?”