Kate watches Josh talk to Tess from across the couch and wants both to tell him to stop and to urge him to keep talking. She watches Tess’s posture, the way Josh sits farther forward in his chair.

She pulls off the twins’ snow pants as they each eat their third piece of pizza. “You guys have fun out there?” she says.

“The most fun,” Jamie says.

“Jack, use your napkin, not your T-shirt.”

“When does Santa come?”

“Tomorrow night.”

“You guys want cookies?” Alice calls from the kitchen.

“Yes please!” both boys say, jumping up.

Kate walks across the room to her brothers.

“I can’t talk without my lawyer present,” says Martin as she sits down across from them.

Henry laughs, his head down toward his drink, then up at Kate. Grow up, she wants to say. You’re too old to laugh at his dumb jokes like this.

“What ails you, Kate-bug?” says her oldest brother.

It’s what Helen called Kate when she was little; her brothers only ever said it to her as a tease. She feels like she might cry and wills herself not to. She squeezes each knee with a hand and breathes in hard, then reaches for the rest of Martin’s drink.

“Maybe you should try to think and talk more often without your lawyer’s help,” she says.

“Look who’s talking,” says Martin, nodding toward Josh.

“They’ve all got us by the balls,” Henry says.

When Nick died, Tess and Martin were already together, but he drove up to Boston to pick up Kate from college on his own. Together, they drove north to Maine to get Henry, and then they flew out of Portland as a group. She sat between them, her big brothers. Kate was not yet twenty. She was worried for their mother, sad and scared, but also—lodged between them, both their shoulders so much higher, bigger—she had felt better, safer than she had since Helen had called to say their dad was gone.

Tess had come down for the weekend, done up and put together at the funeral, helping Helen navigate the logistics that accompanied Nick’s death. But those first few days, before the funeral and the death certificate, the paperwork and lawyers, it had been the three of them. Helen was in shock, smaller and more quiet than she’d ever been; the house too big by contrast, arid, empty; their rooms still their rooms but made-up, worn-out versions of the rooms that once belonged to them. Helen hardly slept at first, and they’d stayed up with her, watching all her favorite movies and TV shows: British detective dramas, everything Jane Austen. They took turns with her, sleeping in shifts, as Kate and Martin would do years later when they had kids.