Alice kept her word and spent the next few days with Helena. She hated to admit it, but it was a welcome break from everything, even if it had come from a pretty unpleasant place. Still, she liked the fact that it seemed to be working out in everyone’s favor, although she knew getting over it wasn’t going to be as easy as Helena was making it seem.

Telling Alice that she needed to get “back to her old self,” Helena made sure that the two of them went shopping. Not at one of the fancy schmancy boutiques she’d frequented when they’d first become friends, but places like furniture stores and Bed, Bath and Beyond. Alice threw herself into helping Helena get a room set up for her kids inside the condo, and proved to be a lot of help with the design. In the end, Helena decided to trust Alice’s eye rather than that of a designer. This person wouldn’t have been the one she’d used before, and paying a stranger to design her kids’ room seemed cold and impersonal anyhow.

Alice didn’t have that problem. Using the kids’ interests, she helped to transform the room into something they would like. While not someone who was particularly good at assembling furniture, she managed to convince Shane and Max to help build a bunk bed system and strip down a dresser and mirror set for the room, and by the time it was done they all had to admit that it looked pretty good. Max brought everything to the condo in his truck, and they all spent a pleasant day assembling the furniture, painting, and decorating the room and the adjoining bathroom. Dylan was a lot of help too with her eye for color that had been helped by making movies, and by the end of the day, the room looked very inhabitable. They even managed to construct a large desk, on which Helena put the used but still nice computer system she’d bought on Craigslist.

“I feel like a bad mother, making them sleep in the same room,” Helena confided to Alice as they worked.

“There’s not much you can do about it, though,” Alice consoled. “That other room is smaller than my closet, there’s no way you’d be okay with one of the kids cramped in there. Dana just used it for storage. I can’t believe she bought this thing as a three-bedroom, there’s no way that cubbyhole is a room. And the kids are still little. If you stay here we can figure it out in the future, when they’re teenagers or whatever. And that top bunk is pretty cool with the privacy screen and shelves on the wall and stuff; whichever one of them takes that will feel like they have their own room anyway.” What she didn’t say was that with Winnie having close to full custody at this point, she didn’t think the kids would be here enough to mind the room anyway. She knew how much that particular topic hurt Helena, and it killed her because her friend was really a fantastic mom, and it was horrible that she couldn’t see her kids as much as she wanted to.