Tess leaves Colin in the barn with Henry, working with him, he says. She goes back in to check on Stella, who’s with Martin, eating pancakes, telling him a story about a Troodon.

“Everything okay?” says Martin.

She doesn’t want to tell on Colin. “All good,” she says. She’s not angry at him any longer; her run calmed her, loosened her a little. Maybe later she’ll ask Martin if they should talk to Kate about some sort of compromise for Helen’s house.

“You hungry?” he says.

Tess goes to grab hold of Stella, but her daughter pulls away before Tess can get her arms around her. “You’re sweaty,” Stella says. “You stink.”

“Colin’s outside?” says Martin.

Tess keeps her eyes on Stella. “Working with his uncle Henry in the barn.”

Martin takes Stella’s fork and eats a large piece of pancake, nodding toward her. “Of course,” he says. “Important work.”

Tess kisses Stella’s forehead, smiles at Martin. She goes upstairs to the large bathroom and peels off her clothes, pulls her hair out of its rubber band. There’s a space heater in the corner, and she turns it on. She stretches, naked, as she waits for the water to warm up, raises her arms high up over her head and bends in each direction, rolls her shoulders back. Steam comes from the shower, and she goes in and stands a long time underneath it. Most of the good work from the run was undone by the thing with Colin. Even though he was completely fine, helping Henry with the pulley system, thatching thin pieces of wood to connect the birds, though Henry had strung a large spread of sheets across the ceiling so they couldn’t see the end result. Colin claimed to have seen the light out in the barn and gone out to find his uncle. The house has a large backyard but is right up against a major road, and when she left him out there to come inside, she made him promise to go straight from the barn to the house when he came in. He’d nodded as she spoke but refused to look directly at her, and she feels unsure now—sometimes when she talks to him she truly does not know whether he took in anything she said.

Kate flips pancakes for her children. Martin mixed the batter, tripled the Fannie Farmer cookbook recipe that all Helen’s children know by heart, but he only cooked enough for his kids, left the bowl with the remaining batter by the stove. Bea ate Colin’s plate, and now the boys have just come downstairs and are wailing that they’re hungry and why has no one fed them.