Kate waits a while, watching Tess fret over Colin. There’s a sheet covering most of Henry’s work, but she likes the look of him, stronger and more confident, up there in the air. If Martin is the brother that cared for Kate, kept her safe, checked on her in college once a week after their dad died to make sure she wasn’t getting into trouble, Henry is the brother that Kate’s always loved the most. He was quiet but always watching—unfazed mostly, stoic until he got older. Once, growing up, teenaged, driving past a gated community close to their Florida house, he told her he wanted to napalm the place. Entitled fucking rich people, he said, destroying our planet because they’ll always be safe. She didn’t know what he was saying. She knew what napalm was, and she also knew that her family wasn’t rich but neither were they poor and that her brother was self-righteous even then. While Martin went and got a job and then a spouse like other people, while Kate did the same, Henry lived alone in the woods of Maine and only talked to Helen, only ever really cared about his work that wasn’t work in any grown-up sense. He’d met Alice up there, right after she finished art school. Henry never went to art school. Useless, he said, worthless networking, a waste of time.

Alice was beautiful and smart; Kate could hardly look at her when they met. When she did, she couldn’t help but stare, so she tried to not be in the same room with her for too long. It wasn’t only her appearance but her power over Henry. She got him to leave the woods when no one else, not even Helen, could. She got him to move to New York, which he’d spent his whole life saying was where people went to pretend to be whatever they’d set out to be instead of being it. He would still say that for most of the time he lived there, but he liked Alice more than he hated New York. And in the city, he had friends, endless rounds of friends who got him “gigs” when he needed money. He helped build sets for film shoots, read out loud to a blind man, moved art from warehouses to museums, did permitless construction jobs.

Kate was thrilled by the stories he told her, by his and Alice’s always too-cold, art-filled tiny studio close to the water, the stunning, arid art of their friends on their walls. Before she and Josh were married, she’d stay with Henry and Alice occasionally even though Martin and Tess’s place had a whole extra bedroom. She’d sleep on the couch beneath their lofted bed, and they’d go out late and walk home together, drunk, over the Williamsburg Bridge.