Cate comes to recognize some of the faces around the evening fires: young people like themselves, and older people; people whose faces tell stories, of weather and work and lives lived outside. At night, with tea and whiskey these older people loosen their tongues—they speak of Enclosure, of the Commons, of an older, wilder Britain, of gentle and not so gentle defiance of the status quo. Cate thinks she can touch it, this life-giving current, ribboning out into the clear western night.

And then they dance.

One dark night, at one small gathering, in high summer, when the air is still warm at midnight, where there are no lights, when there is no moon, Cate loses Lucy. She wanders around for hours, searching, feeling panic bite at the edges of her. She finds her again as dawn begins to break, sitting in the middle of a pile of people, naked from the waist up, her nipples painted gold.

Lucy holds out her arms for Cate and Cate steps into them and then, filled with love and relief and a desire to claim, she bends her head to Lucy’s golden nipple and takes it into her mouth. It tastes of salt and metal and earth.

Soon after, as the sun presses itself against the windows of her van, Cate slides her fingers into the slick warmth of Lucy and encounters no resistance. She watches Lucy buck and arch beneath her, her eyes half closed. She sees a tattoo on Lucy’s inner thigh, a filigree spider, a filigree web, and she puts her mouth on it, kisses it. She herself is shivering with desire—she doesn’t even need to be touched to come.

Cate

MID-MORNING AND TOM IS SLEEPING. CATE SITS AT THE kitchen table, the bag of pills beside her.

Come on, Cate, nip it in the bud.

As though it were that easy.

This morning she went to the doctor, as Hannah suggested. The doctor was nice, was kind; she asked about Cate’s eating, sleeping, libido. She asked about the manner of the birth and Cate told her.

Caesarean section.

And was that hard?

She thought about the fear—for her child, for herself. The confusion. The knives and numbness, the smell of burning flesh.

Yes. I suppose it was.

The doctor asked about whether she thought of hurting herself, hurting her son. No, said Cate. Not that.

The doctor said that yes, she thought Cate was depressed. She said there was cognitive behavioral therapy, but a long waiting list, or antidepressants. But if she took antidepressants she would have to wean her son. She asked if Cate had ever been on antidepressants before.

Yes, Prozac. At university.

Good, said the doctor. Well, perhaps we’ll start with that.