Their place is set deep in the ground. You have to walk downstairs after coming in the door, and the windows are all small and blocked, in part, by snow. Their complex is filled with cops, all men, and old women who sit out on their stoops for hours and scowl and smoke. They’ve all seen her social worker knocking on their door, and they know what it is to have an open CPS case. Quinn knows, if they so chose, her neighbors could report whatever misdeed they might perceive and so, though she wishes they could get more light, she mostly keeps the curtains closed.

She lets Maddie pick the movie, hoping that it’s not a documentary. “What’s Free Willy?” Maddie calls.

“Perfect choice,” Quinn says. She drains the pasta, cuts a large lump of butter and stirs it in, sprinkles half a tub of Parmesan on top. “Water?”

“Yes, please.”

“Carrots or peppers?”

“Carrots.”

When Quinn was separated from her, when she was in the hospital and then in the halfway house, getting counseled, flattened and dulled by the methadone they gave her, her chest like someone had dug a hole inside it, Maddie had learned to cook a few basic meals at the foster home. It was a safe and clean and loving foster home, said Maddie’s social worker, but Maddie still won’t talk about it a year after coming home. Quinn doesn’t like to let her cook now. She likes performing the role of mother, itemizing, sometimes, once Maddie is in bed, all the things she’s done that day that prove she’s capable and competent.

Quinn cuts off the carrot tops and slices. Maddie queues the movie as she waits for Quinn to set their meals in front of them.

“I cried so hard the first time I watched this movie,” Quinn says, passing Maddie her fork and paper towel.

Maddie sidles forward to reach her feet onto the ground, a pillow still between her and her mother, their pasta on their laps.

“You can squeeze my leg,” Maddie says. “If you get sad.”

Maddie’s not the sort of kid to sit close to Quinn while she’s awake, and Quinn is grateful, as her daughter tears up watching Willy, that she curls in close. She gets to smell her hair, fresh from the shower, to settle her own body into her daughter’s heft and warmth.

“Are we orphans?” Maddie asks her.

“What do you mean, ‘orphans’? I’m your mom.”

“Yeah, but other people have so many other people. Jason Cretara said they’re having twenty-seven people over for Christmas dinner.”

“Jason who hit you in the face with the dodgeball last year?”

“Yeah. He’s not even nice, and he has twenty-seven people who want to come to his house.”

“Sounds stressful and exhausting.”

“But who are our people? Where are they? Why don’t any of them want to have dinner with us?”