As she sips her drink, Kate walks around trying not to envy the size of the house. She ignores the sound of the children fighting on the mattress on the floor in the room where she and Josh and their three kids will sleep. The upstairs bathroom’s large, with an old claw-foot tub with a shower rigged on top; a space heater in the corner whirs. She opens all the drawers and runs her hands over their contents—ovulation strips, tubes of mascara, dried-out foundation rounds. Kate’s the only one of the three women who wears makeup on the weekends. In the medicine cabinet: ibuprofen, lip balm, a line of lotions, that all-natural deodorant that is the reason Henry always smells. There’s a whole hall wall of linen closets, mostly empty: threadbare towels and summer sheets. She takes a pile of extra blankets for the kids.

Of course the place is only this big because they’re so far up here. She looked it up online when Henry and Alice first moved, the square footage and the pricing. She imagines the schools aren’t any good. Alice has told her about some of the clients that she deals with as a social worker—opioids all over. Kate can’t be picky about their house’s size because she doesn’t work. She did once, but Josh stopped her. Though that’s her narrative, he says.

When they found out the twins were twins it hadn’t made sense for both of them to work. Even though Kate made more, Josh would never be the one to stay at home. It wasn’t really about the money, couldn’t only be about the money. Kate was afraid of his not knowing what to do, his forgetting—to pick them up, to feed them, to pay attention, all the things she does. Kate had never loved her job; she loves the time she gets with her kids, though this is not something she would ever say out loud to either of her sisters-in-law.

Josh’s current job is dumb and boring, finance adjacent, but he gets up every morning and she makes breakfast and he kisses her and kisses the children. He likes the feel of it, she thinks, the slipping of the suit over his shoulders, the early-morning shower while she makes the lunches for the kids. He maybe hoped he would be more successful, but his parents’ money made it easy for him to pretend. Except that money’s almost gone now. The steady comfort that so attracted Kate to Josh in college feels far away and separate from the man that he now is.

He yells sometimes, now, after she gets home from the store or if a lot of packages from Amazon show up at once. The money is not endless, Kate, he says, in this way that makes her chest get tight, her jaw fix.