“I get it, though, why she didn’t,” Alice says. “She had a life there. Anywhere else she would have just been a mom.”

“Is that such a bad thing?” Tess says.

“Of course it isn’t. It’s just—I mean this as a compliment, but she was more than just their mom.”

They watch Jamie pick all the pieces of pepperoni off his pizza and shape them into a smile on his flattened paper towel.

“Penny for your thoughts?” they hear behind them.

There is only one person in this house, Tess thinks, who would say this phrase out loud. “How’s the igloo, Josh?” she says.

“The architecture,” he says, “the ingenuity of those cultures is really something.”

Tess looks past him toward Henry and Martin.

“Excited to show it to the kids,” he adds.

“You guys find the outlets okay?” Alice asks.

“Oh yeah,” Josh says. He holds up his phone. “Waze. I wanted to talk to you, Tess.”

Alice starts walking toward the kitchen. “Who wants dessert?” she says.

Tess almost screams at her to stop. “Sure,” she says to Josh instead.

He sidles close, and she can smell him, beer and soap and pizza. “I know how you feel, about the house,” he says.

“I don’t think we should talk about this without everyone.” She gestures around the room—Martin sitting next to Henry at the table, talking, Kate on the couch, quietly eating her pizza, the kids all still spread out, seated on the floor.

“I don’t want to make any decisions. I just want to talk.”

Tess can see the front door over his shoulder. She could grab the keys hanging on the hook in the mudroom, put on her coat and boots and drive back to their apartment. Leave the kids here with Martin. She could sit, quiet and alone, until they’ve performed all their precious rituals and Martin and the kids can come back home.

“Then talk,” she says. “I guess.”

“I think you know what this means to Kate,” he says. “What Helen meant to her.”

“I’m not sure what you want me to say to that.”

“You understand, though? What I mean by that.”

“This doesn’t have anything to do with how much any of us loved Helen.”

“Sure, but . . .”

“It’s money, Josh. An asset. You’re familiar with the process of inheritance. It’s not possible to split a house in three.”

“We could set up a payment plan,” he says. His chin is narrow. He has a fine film of day-old stubble on both cheeks. “We could pay you all, over the next decade. As soon as we get settled there.”

“We all have expenses,” she says.

“As you say,” Josh says, sitting up a little straighter, “you also have a job.”