“Aaron, come down!” Honey says, running toward the tree. She stops at the foot of it, and I see her take a deep breath. When she lets it out, it steams around her like she is in charge of making the clouds in the sky.

“Aaron,” she calls gently now, hugging her arms around her body. “Aaron.”

I stand frozen in place. I don’t know what to do. I stare at the drips of blood on the white snow.

“Milla, go get our coats,” Honey commands, turning to me for a second before she looks back up again. I run to the mudroom and pull off the first two things I find and everything else on that hook falls to the ceramic floor with a thump. I stuff my feet into someone’s boots and grab two more. When I run back out with all the stuff falling out of my arms, Honey is still standing at the bottom of the tree in her slippers, speaking quietly up to Aaron. As I approach with the coats and boots, I think I hear her saying, “It’s okay, Aaron, you’re not in trouble,” but she waves me back and continues to talk in a soft voice.

Then Aaron nods his head up and down.

“Hot chocolate?” he says. “Okay.” He nods one more time and climbs down, lightly tapping Honey’s outstretched hand with his own in their fist bump. Honey tries to give him a piggyback to the house, but after a few steps, he squirms away and skips in his bare feet through the shallow snow ahead of us. All our trampling and footprints have marked up the backyard so that it looks like a Chutes and Ladders board.

Honey expertly bandages Aaron’s finger, wraps him tightly in the big blanket from the den, and gently pushes him onto the couch. He is shivering. She sits next to him, holding him close.

“Milla, the hot chocolate!” she says. “Heat it up.”

“Um.” I grimace and shift my feet. “I don’t know how to turn on the stove.”

“Just stick the mug in the microwave, Milla.”

I’ve never used the Wines’ microwave before, but her tone makes me feel foolish, so I just turn into the kitchen, shove the mug into the microwave, and press some buttons. It starts. When it beeps that it’s done, I open it back up: Half the hot chocolate has overflowed over the side and onto the tray. I grab a paper towel and mop up as best as I can and carry the mug carefully into the den.

Honey has taken the broken old lady, severed from her balloons, and placed both pieces on the coffee table. “It’s okay, Aaron,” she repeats over and over again, tears trailing silently down her cheeks as she rubs his arms under the blanket. I bring the hot chocolate, and Honey takes it from me, holding it gently to Aaron’s lips.

Aaron’s face looks the same as it always does: like a cute six-year-old boy’s, framed by the same golden hair as Honey’s, with the same smattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks but without any clue—at least to me—what he might be feeling. I swallow when I think about how I avoid looking at Max’s face whenever I leave for Honey’s on Shabbat afternoons. I don’t want to see him looking sad. Does Aaron know he was in danger—and that it was our fault? Does he know how scared we were, and had he been scared too? Can he feel how much Honey loves him? My dad says that studying Talmud is like being a lawyer: It is about learning rules, understanding them, and then applying them to situations. But people are not like that, and what other people think or feel—or what I might think and feel—is only a starting point, a jab in the dark about what someone else might be thinking or feeling. With people, there is no Ari Schoenberg who knows all the answers, and there is no Josh Wine to make sure everybody else knows them too.