“You’re sure this isn’t some crisis?” says Henry. “A grief response or something. What if a year from now you wake up horrified you turned your whole life upside down?”

“What life, though, Henry?” Kate says. She turns from the window toward him. “I take the kids to school. I do the laundry. I make the breakfasts and the lunches and the dinners. I can do that anywhere. I want to do it where I can give my kids as good as what we had.”

“But what about . . .” She sees him straining, her big brother, wanting to make more of her life, to elevate it, like he always wants to elevate things, into something more special and ambitious than it actually is. She looks out the window again, past the barn into the woods, stick season, Alice calls it. Most of the leaves are missing, the stolid trunks and the reaching, overlapping branches jut. She should bundle the kids up and take them out to show them, bring her phone and take a picture of how clean and perfect it all looks.

“It’s not bad, you know,” she says to Henry. “It’s not all awful drudgery—my kids, my husband. I have people I can talk to; I can find other people I can talk to. Josh still makes me laugh.”

The boys have finished eating, and she calls to them to wash their hands as they ignore her and escape upstairs to find their cousins. Kate picks up both plates, and Henry takes them, cleans them.

“The beach is nice,” he says. “Bea would be killer on a surfboard.”

“Think how much fun we had,” she says. “And I need it, Henry. A shift. A change. I need to feel close to her in some way. I need that house more than the birds do.”

Alice checks her phone for texts from Maddie, lights a cigarette again outside. Yesterday she baked a bunch of slabs of gingerbread for a gingerbread house project—Helen used to do this—but she doesn’t feel up to the mess of it quite yet. She wants to sit all day out here and not talk to any of them. It’s Henry’s family, she thinks. Henry can take care of it.

“Pointless, probably,” Josh says. “To say you shouldn’t do that.” He nods toward her cigarette.

He’s come up behind her suddenly, and she stops herself from flinching, pulls hard on her cigarette. “Definitely not worth your time,” she says.

He pulls both gloves off and inspects them, then stuffs them in his coat pockets and runs his hands together, blowing on them. “Got a fucking hole in my gloves,” he says.

“Henry might have an extra pair somewhere,” she says.

“Are they Gore-Tex?”

“No idea.”

“Those three can’t help but act like kids when they’re together,” he says.

“You mean your wife?” she says.