Alice thought he was immune to any sense of whether anybody cared about or bought or paid attention to the things he made, but really, it had been easy to keep going as long as she was there. She knew more about form than anyone he’d ever known, had always been the more ambitious, better at the parties and the networking and the slide submissions, better at making a career. He’d trusted her enough—her commitment not only to her own work but to his—to keep going. Except then she’d stopped making. To see her every day but separate, to go to work without her there: his anger had shifted, to his own ineffectuality, the uselessness of what he did; the solar panels he’d ordered last winter were still in the attic. They both drove electric cars, but what help was that? The change they needed was monumental and systemic. He should run for office, camp outside the door of his various congresspeople. Be active. Instead he went out to his barn and made more birds. He came inside at night and tried to make his sad wife laugh. The weight of this—everything he wasn’t—felt different without Alice there beside him, knowing what he did. It felt sharper, more granular and local, after all those years of trying for a baby. He didn’t even really want a baby, felt it was destructive, willful ignorance—and yet. He had spent years with no one who seemed to see or feel what he saw or felt, except for Alice, briefly—and then all that stupid hope. And then Alice gone again.

It’s well past both kids’ bedtimes, and Stella is cranky, languid, clutching her stuffed platypus. Colin’s jumping on the bed. Tess is so relieved to be alone with just her husband and her kids. Her family, she thinks, and then feels bad for thinking it.

“Stop!” says Martin. The duvet is a jumble, and half the pillows have fallen. Tess is working to get the fitted sheet onto the air mattress Alice has blown up on the floor for Colin and Stell to share.

“Martin,” Tess says. They have to get the extra pillows out of the car, and she’s worried Stella might complain about the texture of the blankets. She needs all of them to go to sleep so she can breathe a bit, maybe write some work emails, before she gets to sleep herself.

“He has to calm down,” says Martin.

“He’s—”

“Please don’t tell me that he’s tired.”

“He is. We all are.” He thinks she makes too many excuses, is too easy on them, but they are tired. They’re little kids.