Kate comes up to Bea and grabs her braid, unbraids and begins to rebraid it.

“So fast,” Alice says.

The kids are all cross-legged on the floor with their pizza. Both twins still wear their snow pants; Colin has his hat skewed sideways on his head.

Tess stands close to Alice, talking in a whisper. It feels important to her that Alice see this whole thing from her side. She thinks about the time that she came up here, brought Alice gin and chocolate, how good it felt to sit with her, be there for her, like that. “I’m not going to rub it in anybody’s face,” she says. She too has a glass of bourbon. “But we’ve already sunk at least a hundred grand into that house over the past decade. Martin didn’t want Helen to have to pay a mortgage; we had to get the foundation redone and new windows to keep the insurance low after that year with all the hurricanes. We got the roof fixed. That place sucked money. She should have sold it years ago. Of course no one told sweet baby Kate.”

Only Tess and Martin knew how bad it had been for Helen, for how long. On and off in Nick and Helen’s life together there had been issues around money. He had not planned for his demise so early; they had never had much savings. She had gone to college, studied French literature and philosophy, but had never had a full-time job. She would spend the ten years after her husband’s death in jobs she didn’t like and that didn’t much like her—an assistant teacher at a preschool, a receptionist for their childhood dentist, a real estate salesperson. She would struggle not to let the children know, to continue to send them gifts and pay for school and room and board and lend them money in those early years when they still asked—the years Martin paused grad school to teach high school because he couldn’t live off of his stipend and she couldn’t write the check she would have had to write to convince him not to work those years until Tess finished law school and got a job and he went back. She would refuse to leave the house where they were born and where her plants were, where all their rooms were still their rooms. She would accumulate debt for years before Martin and Tess learned how much.

Alice picks a piece of pepperoni off her pizza. “It was her home, though,” she says.

Tess feels a flash of irritation, regrets the “sweet” and “baby” she used about Kate. But we’re friends, Tess wants to say. I’m not awful, she wants to say. What I’m asking for is what is fair. She takes a third sip of her bourbon. “You wanted her to sell it too,” she says at last.