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“What’s the big deal?” Mom asks Kristine. “They’re not going anywhere.”

“We’re in a giant cabin made of wood,” Kristine says slowly. I have to agree with her. This seems like a precarious idea at best, a liability at worst.

But Mom sinks her teeth in. “This is the one thing that’s vitally important to me and my family’s traditions. My girls are both here now, and I want to light the fucking menorah with them, okay?!”

Hannah and I exchange looks. We’ve never remembered to light the menorah past the second night. Why is this becoming a thing?

“I need to talk to you. In there,” Mom says, all of the warmth gone from her voice. She walks into their bedroom without a second look. Kristine nods, following her in and shutting the door behind them.

It’s quiet for a moment. We all stand around, unsure of what to do. Finally, Hannah gets up and retrieves a handful of dreidels and a large bag of gelt from her suitcase, placing them on the dining table.

“You brought these?” I ask.

“I figured it was going to be a long couple days.” My sister shrugs, sliding onto the dining chair closest to her.

“What’s all of that?” Genevieve asks with genuine curiosity.

“You’ve never played dreidel?” I try to cut any judgment out of my voice.

She shakes her head no.

I sigh, sitting down at the table, then pull open the yellow mesh bag of gold-wrapped chocolate coins and start divvying them up into four piles on the table.

“Okay,” I say, picking up a neon pink plastic dreidel from Hannah’s stash.

Henry and Genevieve fill in the remaining seats next to, not across from, each other. I’m not sure that she’s looked in his direction since they returned from their coffee, but if this is the way to keep the peace for the rest of her time here, I’ll do it.

“We all start by putting one piece of gelt in. Then it becomes kind of like UNO, you follow the direction of the side you land on. So give it a spin,” I say, dropping the dreidel from the air, and watching as it lands on the table and twirls around on the dark wood. It lands on the shin. “This one is shin, which means I have to put one piece into the pot.” I spin the dreidel around, explaining the other sides to Genevieve. She’s the only one who’s new to this.

Henry mindlessly twists a dark blue plastic dreidel in his palm, the same one he always favored as a kid.

We start to play, and Henry lands on gimel, giving him the full pot, three rounds in a row.

“Unfair!” my sister exclaims. She always gets very competitive.

“You’re working at an advantage!” I say. “It’s those big hands! You’ve got more velocity!”

“My big hands are to blame?” he asks innocently, and I detect the smallest hint of devilishness in his tone. “It’s a twenty-five percent chance. Completely random.”

Suddenly, the arguing from my mom’s bedroom cuts through the closed door. I can’t make out everything, but I hear their mix of indiscernible voices: “blatant disregard” and “irrational behavior” and “shouldn’t be this hard.”

We all look to the door, waiting for something. Someone to emerge? The fight to escalate? But the room goes silent, or maybe they just realized we could hear them.

“I’m sure it’ll blow over by the morning,” Henry says, and I nod.

Mom and Kristine have been nothing but absolutely enamored with each other. He’s probably right, as much as I hate to give him any credit at this moment in time.

“At least our breakup involved less yelling,” Genevieve mutters, the first (albeit indirect) thing I’ve clocked her saying to Henry since we first arrived at the lodge.

“Sorry, are you sure you don’t need me to drive you to the airport?” he asks sharply.

“Don’t worry about it,” she says as if he should, in fact, be deeply worried. “Daddy is sending a car, but he is not happy about any of this.”

“I really am sorry, Gen.” His voice is earnest as he twists a chocolate coin between his fingers, eyes on her. “I hope this won’t affect things at work.”

Genevieve pushes back in her chair, disbelief on her face. “Oh my God, grow up, Henry. I’m not a supervillain. You’re the one who made us DTR. That’s on you. If you weren’t into this, you could have just said so, or breadcrumbed me like a normal person. I’m not going to fuck up your job. I can’t believe you would even say that. You may not want to be with me, but surely you know me better than that at this point. Gonna be really easy to get over you if that’s what you think of me.”

Hannah and I exchange uncomfortable looks. Dreidel can get heated, but not usually like this. There’s clearly a lot more to their story than we know, and we’re stuck as unwilling audience members watching it all play out.