“They’re not gross, Henry. They’re parents. They’re trying to give their kids the lives they think they should have.”

Later, Alice watches as Henry walks back to the barn. She goes back into the house by herself. He hugged her, held her. He can’t help it, she thinks, leaving her like this.

Tess sends a few more work emails, and Martin manages not to tell her that she shouldn’t look at screens in bed.

Josh follows Kate up the stairs and puts Bea back in bed next to her brothers. He reaches an arm around Kate’s waist, and she waits for him to fall asleep so she can wriggle out from underneath and watch a baking show on her phone to settle down the whirring in her brain.

Henry wishes, thinking about his mother, about her house and those perfect gorgeous birds in her backyard—as he walks out to the barn, already grateful for the quiet and the dark, the long expanse of blank white snow he has to cross—Henry wishes he could sit outside with her under the stars. He wants to sit and explain to her, as he never did when she was alive, how beautiful it was, when he was little, body flat and still on the high, wet grass of their backyard, the squish of soil: a flock, a pack, a bunch of birds would swoop down and up, soar by, and he’d stay quiet. How they all moved together in one fluid bunch, as if they were a larger organism, not quite separate, as if they intuited one another’s needs, their wants.

Everything he reads about this behavior focuses on efficiency, sensing and responding to the various magnetic pulls beneath the earth, but he’s not interested in efficiency, has always hated the idea of it. It feels like more than that, and that’s the part he wants to get right in his work—the part he wishes he could explain to his mother, to maybe ask her to help him understand it: the beauty of it, the inexplicable impossibility of their togetherness. How it cannot possibly be only about the wind and energy conservation. Eons before this, augurs used to divine omens in these flight patterns—he wishes he could tell his mother—it’s a simple fact of nature but also otherworldly, as close as he will ever get to faith.