“All three of them,” he says. “My wife, your husband. Martin. We could make that house worth twice as much.”

“Josh,” she says, “I don’t want to talk about this now.” She finishes her cigarette and stubs it out on the side of the house, looking past Josh toward the woods.

“You know, that igloo,” he says, nodding toward it, “it can get up to sixty-seven degrees inside it. I watched this YouTube thing about it last week.”

“Very cool,” she says, wishing he’d just leave her.

“It is,” he says. “I think it is.”

“You guys!” Tess calls to the kids as Alice gets out gingerbread slabs to make houses. It’s too early for this much sugar, but Tess wants to keep the children close.

Kate pours the candy into bowls, and Alice gets blunt knives to spread the frosting. Tess gets each kid settled with six slabs of gingerbread and enough frosting to connect each of the parts. “Colin, stop it,” she says, as he pops a third piece of candy into his mouth.

“Jack already ate a whole bowl.”

“You’re the oldest.”

“So I’m punished for being old?”

“I empathize,” says Martin, coming up behind him, taking a piece of candy.

“You won’t have anything to decorate your house with,” Tess says, ignoring Martin.

“I don’t care about the stupid house.”

Bea cries because her house keeps caving in, and the boys give up and each eat one of their walls. They throw gummy cherries at one another, laughing. Jamie has red frosting in his hair, and Jack licks it off. Kate holds Bea’s hand and uses her other hand to hold the walls in place. “It’s going to be beautiful,” she says.

“It’s not,” Bea says. “It’s ruined.”

Kate squeezes the walls harder. She feels like she might cry too. It’s all, it’s always, so much less than she thought it would be when they started. The gumdrops are all crooked, the colors are too dull. The candy cane they placed in the middle of the roof fell through and is stuck now, cracked down the middle, so that the roof is much higher on the left. Alice put food coloring in two of the bowls of frosting, and Bea spread it on the wall’s sides, but the heat is on too high and the frosting’s melted, drooping. There’s too much candy on one wall.

“It’s going to be perfect,” Kate says, looking at Bea, still holding her hand. She lets go of the wall and leans back. The walls droop more, list, but they don’t fall, and Kate reaches into the back pocket of her jeans to get her phone. “See?” she says, nudging Bea into the frame and trying to find an angle that makes the house look less sad. “A masterpiece.”