“What is the scar she has? Matthew asked to see her scar—I know Em showed him,” Grace said.

“Em had her appendix out, like Molly—like Madeline,” I said.

“Fuck Madeline!” Grace screamed.

I went into Matthew’s bedroom, to make sure he was asleep, before I went looking for the empty guest bedroom—the one Em or the snowshoer hadn’t put their stuff in. I left the bedroom door open. I wanted Em to be able to find me when she came wandering. It was a moonlit night; I knew Em could see me in the moonlight. I was trying to stay awake until she came, but I was asleep when Em found me—in the predawn light, no thanks to the moon. I knew it was Em with my eyes closed, from the way she hugged me.

“Now what’s rrr-rong?” Em whispered, rolling her rrr’s. “I know you’re in trouble, Longhand Man. Whatever you do, I hope you know your biggest priority is the littlest one.”

“I know,” I whispered. At first, Grace and I had tried to make it work; we’d tried to stay together for Matthew’s sake. Lately, I told Em, Grace and I had been strategizing about the best way to break up—meaning the best way for Matthew. “But there’s no way to do it without hurting Matthew,” I whispered to Em.

“When you’re a child,” Em whispered back, “you don’t understand how the adults who love you and protect you can hurt you.”

I didn’t want to go down the childhood road with Em—not with her hugging me in the guest bedroom in the predawn light. I tried to change the subject, but there was nothing as important to me, or to Em, as protecting Matthew from the fallout of my deteriorating marriage. “What happened in Aspen is a movie,” I’d written Em, but I hadn’t shown her the movie; I’d not sent her my no-end-in-sight Loge Peak screenplay. I could tell Em knew I came back from Aspen with a lot of explaining to do, and I hadn’t done any explaining. I didn’t want to go down that road with Em, either.

I should have known Em knew what was on my mind, as long ago as when I danced with her at my mom’s wedding, or when I gave her the snowshoer kiss—the best kiss I could manage at fourteen, the kiss Em ramped up when she gave it to Nora.