Madeline reached the Stevensons’ house in under ten minutes, a painful stitch in her side and her lungs on fire. Kate’s parents summoned the paramedics. The minutes stretched endlessly as they waited. Madeline knew her father would likely be one of the respondents, and she dreaded seeing him, not knowing what to say. The ambulance roared up, and he jumped out of the back, saving her the awkwardness of talking to him by completely ignoring her. Even as she led them back to Kate, he didn’t so much as meet her eyes. On the riverbank, the EMTs immobilized Kate on a gurney and transported her back to the ambulance. Madeline placed Winthrop next to Kate’s thin arm as they loaded her inside.

Her chest expanded with relief as her father drove away. Another moment of uneasiness over, another moment of their inevitable encounters survived. It hit her powerfully then that when she moved, she wouldn’t have to see either parent ever again.

Now she sat in a worn-out cushioned chair in the emergency room, having been checked for hypothermia herself. Luckily she was all right and had changed into dry clothes. Her long, wavy brown hair hung in wet tangles around her shoulders. Across from her, Kate’s father wept noisily, holding the girl’s robot, and her mother looked exhausted, anxiously glancing up every time a doctor entered the room to talk to a nurse or another family.

As Kate’s father cried, Madeline couldn’t help but notice the stench of alcohol radiating from him. He smelled saturated with it.

It made her profoundly sad. Paul Stevenson was a nice man, a creative genius who had never been able to realize his dream in life: to make a living at painting. He had turned to drinking just last year and lost his job because of it. The whole town knew about it, and small towns could be as cruel as they were kind. The rumors were tearing his family apart, and Paul wept now, openly and grievously, in the face of such a near tragedy.