“I’ll stay with her,” Joan said to Vanessa in a low whisper. Eventually, Joan’s parents were going to sleep in the room with Frances. But Joan didn’t mind waiting for them. “You can head home.”

“No way,” Vanessa said. “I want to stay, too.”

There was a balcony with two chairs and a mottled-glass coffee table. Joan grabbed two beers from the minibar and the two of them went out there. There was no bottle opener.

“I got it,” Vanessa said. She lined the first beer up along the railing of the balcony at an angle and then swiftly, confidently, slammed her hand down and popped the top off, handing Joan the bottle.

“Wow,” Joan said, standing next to her, leaning against the railing. “I feel like I know everything about you, but I didn’t know you could do that.”

Vanessa did it again for hers. “I try to remain a woman of mystery.”

“I don’t need any mystery,” Joan said.

They were quiet for a moment until Vanessa cleared her throat and said, her voice cracking halfway through, “I’m sorry that I can’t give you all this. What they have.”

Joan looked at her.

Vanessa closed her eyes. “I feel like I…” She shook her head. “That maybe you could have had more—had an easier life—if I hadn’t convinced you to love me.”

Joan took Vanessa’s hand. “I don’t think you had any say over whether or not I loved you,” Joan said. “I don’t even think I had any say in it. It happened without me even giving myself permission.”

Vanessa looked at her and smiled, but Joan could tell she was serious.

“I would give you anything I could,” Vanessa said. “But I will never be able to give you what your sister has, or what Donna and Hank have.”

“I don’t think that’s necessarily true,” Joan said.

“I can’t hold your hand as we cross the street,” Vanessa said. “I can’t pull you into the crook of my shoulder when we go to the movies. I can’t ask you if you want to dance.”

Joan nodded.

“I can’t stand up in front of everyone we know and announce how good it feels to love you,” Vanessa said.

When Joan was a kid, she learned that her father’s father had left him when he was a baby. She could not imagine this, being raised without a father. She had asked her father if he had missed him. And her father had said, “You can’t miss something you never had.” It had sounded good at the time. It had a finality to it that she had liked.

But it wasn’t true, was it?

Joan missed what she’d never had every time Donna and Hank arrived for the all-astronauts meeting in the same car on Monday mornings.