He wears a sweater and jeans and smells like shower. She likes him less around her brothers. When they’re alone together, at home, she likes the way he talks. But when they’re anywhere where her brothers and their wives are able to judge him, she can hear every naive thing he says, and it grates.

He was kind to her when they met in college—it was the semester after her dad died, and she was still so sad—and that kindness seemed like a good enough reason to be with him. She liked his commitment to grand gestures, a trip to Jamaica their first year together (Tacky, said Helen, but she had always been a snob), nice dinners and real dates when most of her friends just had pizza in their dorm rooms, the way he was with her when they were first together, wanting only to be there with her and nothing else. She envied how sure he was all the time, how easy he seemed to expect life to be. She learned later that most of this came from knowing he’d always have money—the comfort that that gave him, the way it protected him from ever having to find out all the ways he wasn’t what he thought.

“They couldn’t wait?” he says, on the bed now, pulling on his socks.

“Bedtime,” she says, mimicking Tess.

“Right,” he says.

“You have fun out there?”

“The cold is invigorating.” He stands up and pulls her to him. “You hanging in?”

They still have sex a few times a week, and she mostly doesn’t mind it, even likes it. The twins were five weeks premature, and from the ages of six months to three years they had weekly two-hour Early Intervention therapy with their therapist, Melanie, who was not much younger than Kate. Melanie never talked about herself, was tall and solidly built, big-eyed with jaggedly cut bangs; she often wore too-big jeans, the bottoms of which would scrape along Kate’s hardwood floors. She had been tender with Kate’s boys in such a shocking and specific way, and Kate still pictures her sometimes, as she reaches inside herself with Josh inside her too, and always comes more easily. She appreciates the way that what her husband wants, when they have sex, is something she can give him, the way that after, he goes right to sleep.

She often brings her computer into bed after he’s passed out and watches hours of baking shows until the sun’s up; she doesn’t mind that much how tired she is the next day; it’s such a treat to have that space of time in which no one talks and no one’s touching her.

“You get your picture?” asks her husband.