He’s making them in clay, his birds: there’s a kiln out back, and then he paints them. She knows because she smells it, because she saw him wheel the kiln from the back of his truck into the barn; she’s not been out there since he started, a few weeks after they moved here. She hasn’t asked, nor has he offered. They used to talk so much about work—form, material, shape, and execution; now that she doesn’t make things, feels mortified, in fact, about the years she spent obsessed like him, she’s not sure how they’ll fill up all the days together they have left. Sometimes it’s useful to her, reminding herself to still love him, to think about his fingers forming tiny feathers on the birds’ small wings; to imagine the care it must take—she has no idea their size or what they look like—cupping their weight, holding them at different angles, still and careful and considering.

For years, both before and after she stopped making art, Alice was a person devoted wholly to the conceiving of a baby, and this depleted what little savings they had managed, along with whatever gestures of generosity her mother was willing to offer, and now Alice is sad a lot.

“I want you to see it too,” Henry says.

His body is still close to her and he smells of sweat, paint, cumin, and parsley.

“You can’t work until every one of them is safe in bed,” she says a second time.

“We can’t have just gummies for dinner,” Quinn says. They’ve walked up to the Food Town to get groceries. There’s a path straight from their condo complex, behind the main street, and it is safe and quiet, even after dark. Halfway up the hill she thought she saw her ex-boyfriend. She often thinks she sees her ex-boyfriend. He lives two towns over. She watched Maddie’s posture, tried not to look straight at him, thinking maybe, almost certainly, she must have been mistaken. She tried to move her body in a way that proved how strong she is all by herself.

Quinn speaks loudly now for the same reason, walking through the Food Town. She wants the people in the store to hear how sweet and funny and responsible she is.

“Pasta,” Maddie says. “And Parmesan. The good butter’s on sale.”

Quinn loads the cart with frozen vegetables and chicken fingers; they get a large bag of the Pink Lady apples Maddie loves. Quinn selects bread and cheese and sliced salami, mayonnaise. She got paid this week, and the holiday is coming, and she lets Maddie pick three pints of ice cream—cookie dough, cookies and cream, and chocolate—because the Häagen-Dazs is three for ten.