“Illegal. You didn’t do anything illegal. You fucked up, though. You crossed a line.” It all feels intimate and messy, even though he didn’t sleep with anyone. It’s the clarity with which she sees how little, actually, she knows about her husband’s life, the sharpness and the shock of it. What it felt like, the day he told her, abashed and sorry and so separate, Tess rifling through the hours and hours when he could have been or done anything without her there to see him. That sickly, slippery feeling that she would never be safe really, that there was no one in the world that she could wholly trust.

“What do you want me to do about it? I told you I was sorry. I was stupid. What else is there to do or say?”

“I don’t know, Martin.”

“What do you want, Tess? Just tell me what you want me to do, and I will.”

Kate finishes wrapping the last present, her corners perfect. They’ve just come back to find Tess and Martin looking chastened, were able to get upstairs without having to chat. Josh comes out of the shower and pulls on jeans and a shirt.

“The kids are almost here, I think,” she says, seeing Alice’s group text. Josh stands close to her. He’s not said he’s sorry but he pulled two weed gummies out of the glove compartment and stopped twice on the side of the road so she could take pictures of the mountains with her phone and post them on Instagram. It’s his way of apologizing. “Can you help me put all this away?” She feels lighter now, a little giddy, from the weed.

They pile the presents on the highest closet shelf.

“What if they don’t give it to us?” she says.

“We’ll get a rental,” he says. “If you really want to go to Florida we can find something. I’ll find some sort of job eventually.”

“We can’t afford it,” she says. “There is no rental market.”

“We’re renting your mom’s house out right now. And we’ll have extra money once we sell it.”

“Everybody does Airbnb. How do you think Tess got so much for it?”

“So we’ll get an Airbnb.”

“That one we got when we went down was fifteen hundred a week.” Her buzz from the gummy begins to dissipate.

“I don’t know, Kate. Maybe we give up, then. Stay put.”

Downstairs they hear the kids. Boots and coats and yells and screams and doors opening and closing. “Bathroom, Colin,” they hear Tess say.

“Pizza, everybody,” Martin calls from somewhere farther underneath them.

“Pizza,” Josh says, smiling at her. He pulls another couple gummies from his pocket.