As she walks toward home, the cold is biting, sharp. She looks behind her once, then twice, then three times, that feeling in her body that maybe he’s behind her. She thinks, briefly—and will later force herself to remember that she thought this—of the tramadol in her drawer inside a drawer. She thinks—and this part she’ll hold tight to—this is the last time she’s going to leave Maddie alone at night like this. What’s better than home with Maddie? Beer, men, an hour to herself: none of it comes close to being with her girl.

Alice gets in her car and puts the windows down and drives farther up the hill instead of down toward Quinn and Maddie’s. Kate falls asleep between the twins while Josh is passed out next to Bea in the bed on the floor. Tess stays up writing work emails next to Martin, who sits, chastened, after she whisper-yelled at him for not being there to help put the kids to bed. Henry scales the ceiling of the barn, back flat on the scaffolding, fastening his birds, one and then another. He climbs down after each one to check and measure their relationship to one another, to gauge how close they sit both to the ceiling and to the other birds. He wants them close enough that they look from certain angles like one fluid thing, far enough apart that they seem separate, still themselves.

Maddie’s bedroom door is closed, and Quinn comes in and pulls the leftover chicken fingers out of the fridge. She takes off her shoes, stands in socked feet, pours some ketchup on a plate, and eats all three standing up, and after she feels better and more solid. She thinks maybe she won’t check on Maddie—she doesn’t want to wake her—but she’s missed her. But Maddie’s bed is empty, and she isn’t in her room or in the closet, in the bathroom. Quinn checks her own room, underneath the couch, the closet next to the entrance that barely even fits their boots and coats because the landlord still uses it for storage: old buckets and mops, a small axe for clearing the backyard.

“Maddie!” she says, though the apartment’s small and she knows by now that her daughter isn’t in here. Absurdly, she checks every kitchen cabinet, half hoping Maddie somehow folded herself into one of them like she did sometimes when she was little, half hoping that Maddie might come in from outside and find her like this, that she might come up right behind, laughing, thinking what a silly mother she has, saying, Mommy, what are you doing? I’m right here.

Quinn texts her. Baby? Come home. Please baby come home.