Tess watches as he packs the snow into bricks and piles one after the other. “It’s too cold, honey.”

“I have a coat.”

“Can you please stay here?”

“Help me, Stell Bell,” says Henry. It’s hot in this room, the woodstove burning, and he wears a T-shirt, his face a little sweaty and splotched red. He takes Stella from Tess and puts her to work kneading the tortilla dough.

Tess sips her drink and pours herself a little more. She loves Henry with the exact same intensity that she hates Josh, though she didn’t always. He seemed so young when she first met him, almost unformed, though he was, in fact, closer to her age than Martin was. Tess hadn’t even known not to laugh when he first told her he was an artist. I’m an artist interested in climate, he had said—twenty years ago, Tess hadn’t known what “climate” might possibly have to do with “art.” What she knows now is he makes art that engages with what the climate was and what it isn’t any longer, what it will never be again. In the barn, he’s constructing a flock of birds across the length of the ceiling because soon, he’s told her, flocks of birds won’t exist in the way they always have. He’s also told her that soon there will be no olive oil left in Italy, that coffee and chocolate plants need twenty-one straight days without rain to set and flower and soon such places won’t exist. Efforts are being made to preserve the idea of them, the look and taste and smell of each these things; descriptions of the experience are being written down in order that the memory, at least, of what they were remains.

All she does is go to work, he texted about Alice last week.

That’s all you do, Tess said.

We used to work together, he said.

I think the job is saving her, she texted back.