When Cate and Hannah talk, they talk about their children mostly—talk through them, even, reaching for them, touching them often, smoothing their hair. And their children talk, too—they know each other well, it is clear; they tell Lissa about a holiday they all took last summer to France. As Lissa watches, she feels a familiar ache. She will be forty-four on her next birthday. As the years in which she might conceivably conceive have diminished, she has felt a corresponding, surprising sadness rise. It is not that she wants a child, not really; she is happy with her life, with her apartment in a cool-tiled building in Coyoacán, with her partner, who is a kind and gentle man. She and he sleep late on the weekends. They have their lives to themselves. It is just that sometimes, lately, on the way to work, or walking through the weekend markets, she will stop, made suddenly breathless at the sight of a baby. And Mexico is full of babies. But mostly, most days, she is fine. Her partner has a son, a boy of fifteen, who lives with his mother nearby. He spends every other weekend with them. Lissa likes him. He is kind and studious and funny, like his father. He likes to sleep late too.

Hannah’s daughter talks about her dad—who is coming to pick her up later, as she is staying at his house tonight—and the mention of Nathan hovers dangerously in the air between the women, but as the girl chatters on, oblivious, the moment loses its charge, is lost in the next moment, and the next.

They look at each other, these women, as the girls talk, noticing the ways in which they have aged. They are not the same women as they were.

They worry. They worry about their parents—their fathers mostly. Hannah’s father, who forgets things—more and more, it seems—who no longer meets her on the platform at Stockport station when she travels north. Cate’s father, in Spain, who drinks too much, and is lonely. Lissa’s father, who seems to have no joy in his life at all.

They worry about summer, which is coming earlier and lasting longer each year—a worry that taints their enjoyment of this beautiful May afternoon like a dark drop of ink swirled in clear water. Most of all they worry about the future, about their children, about the world they will inherit, a world that seems so fractured and fast and ever more splintered. They worry about how their generation will be judged by those who come after, and if that judgment will be hard, about whether there is still time to rectify this, because, more and more these days, they would like those who come after them to look back and be proud.