Beau quivered in dismay. It took everything I had not to reach for him, but I kept my gaze on Rorie. Underneath her defiance, I could see an edge of something else, the faintest shadow of fear, maybe, or bewilderment. I didn’t know whether to keep issuing the same denial—I’d already said I loved them equally—or try something else. Before I could commit to a course of action, Beau bent double in his seat, literally felled by grief at the notion that he might be favored over someone else. “Don’t say that, Rorie, please,” he said in a tiny voice, his face smashed down on his knees. “Don’t say that.”

“Oh, Beau-Beau,” Rorie said, reaching across me. She made a crooning noise as she rubbed his little back. “It’s okay. I’m sorry.”

“Mommy loves you, Roar,” he said, almost inaudibly.

“I know she does. I’m really sorry.”

“I don’t want to be the favorite. It would make you sad.”

“It would,” she agreed, leveling an intense look at me above his shoulder, “but you’re not the favorite. I was being an ass.”

“Rorie,” I said helplessly. Rorie’s eyelids fluttered and suddenly her teenaged saltiness fell away, revealing the unfeigned sweetness of the little girl underneath. “I’m sorry, Mom,” she mouthed.

Now, looking back, I wish I could re-create that moment and suspend it, leaving me free to pull them both onto my lap, to wrap my arms around their bodies and breathe in the scents of their skin and contain them at these ages, while they were still innocent of what was to come. And me: I was innocent as well, unaware not only of the wave poised to break over the world but also of the manner in which our collective trauma would coalesce for me into an unthinkable choice between my children. It wouldn’t happen until the last days of the pandemic, many months away. But it was coming, my future outlined already by a series of immutable events. If I’d known that then, I’d have tried harder to reassure Rorie of how much I loved her.

—

WE REACHED DECLAN’S flat, housed in a narrow four-story building with a rooftop view of Seville’s famed cathedral, and deposited our bags. In a vestibule inside the door, some cheap bicycles stood shackled to a pole, since, like me, Declan wasn’t big on cars.

Sunshine doused the streets, and I found myself grinning. There was something so freeing about being able to hop on a bicycle and swoop off, birdlike, down the narrow stone streets, pumping our legs until they ached, swerving to avoid the metal chairs of the sidewalk cafés and the inevitable clots of confused tourists. The children, thrilled with the autonomy of biking on a lovely day, whooped and hollered as they approached the Plaza de España.