They’re almost home, off the main street. Quinn thinks she sees the social worker’s car parked near their place, but then the car pulls out, drives off. Quinn squints but she can’t tell if the car is Alice’s; her eyes feel worn out from all the time in front of screens at work. She has two bags slung over the same shoulder: all the snacks she packed for Maddie, the books she brought, her wallet, keys, and phone. They pass an older couple, and Quinn stops wobbling her limbs as she notices them watch her and Maddie too close, too long—looking. Imminent danger, she thinks, which is the language that they used the first time they took Maddie from her, the language that runs through her brain a thousand times a day.

“Peregrine falcon!” Maddie says—her favorite. The couple has walked past them. The path is straight down a hill, the sidewalk cleared of snow, and both Quinn and Maddie spread their wings out wide and high and fly straight down.

The House

1

A foot of snow’s stuck to the ground, and the last bit of sun still glints along the wide white fields. Mountains loom behind: a mess of rock and branches, overlapping trunks, mixed with long patches of white. Tess and Martin drive past the Hudson, up the last long hill, toward Alice and Henry’s house. Tess looks back at the kids, Stella six and Colin almost nine; they’re too old to nap but they’ve passed out, and now they’ll wake up grumbling, hungry, less prone to sleep at the actual right time tonight. Tess catches sight of Kate’s van as Martin puts the car in park—Virginia plates, the back piled haphazardly with stuff—and her neck and shoulders clench. She loves but does not like Kate. She often fantasizes about maiming Josh.

Tess reaches into the back seat to collect the trash from the children’s snacks, to pack the books and tablets from beneath their feet into a canvas bag. “We should have left earlier,” she says to Martin.

“We’re here now,” he says.

The house is old and rambling, two stories, chipped white paint, smoke coming from the chimney. Tess looks back again at the kids, still and quiet as they almost never are. She wishes this visit were already over, that they could all be heading back, grateful for the efforts everybody made but relieved to once again be separate. She steels herself instead for all the time they will have together, the forced acts of being a large extended family, something for which she feels constantly so ill-equipped.

She says: “We sure are.”