Cate reaches for the packet of pills, pops one from its packaging and holds it in her palm. The innocuous white and hospital green. They used to make her head fizz. If she drank while she was on them, she would black out.

She puts the pill down on the table and brings her computer towards her, searches “breastfeeding antidepressants” and reads that the amount of medication that gets to the breastfed baby is usually less than 10 percent of the amount found in the mother’s blood. Which still sounds like an awful lot.

You don’t need antidepressants. You just need better friends.

Her fingers hover over the keys, then she types “Lucy Skein” into Google, feels her heartbeat increase. Several pictures appear, but none that resemble Lucy, although she would be older now of course, much older. She was four years older than Cate, so forty now, or nearly so. Perhaps Lucy Skein was never even her real name.

They parted in the States. They had gone there to Seattle, to take part in the protests against the WTO. Had locked themselves into acrylic pipes and shut down the city. Had watched the police on their horses, their black uniforms, their masked faces, like a scene from a fairy tale, good against evil, light against dark. Had sat and chanted with thousands of other protestors as they were sprayed with tear gas till they were burning and almost blind. She remembers the pain, the inrush of feeling—the ecstatic logic of the binary. Of black and of white. Of being right.

After Seattle they went down to Eugene, Oregon, and lived in a squatted warehouse for a couple of months with ten other activists, and that was where Lucy heard about the protest camps by Mount Hood—loggers cutting down ancient trees. They caught a ride out there together, walked out into the forest on a crisp November morning, the mountain rearing before them, the tang of earth and resin and snow in the air. They reached the camp, and there were the trees, and the people in those trees, their shouts and whistles as they moved about in nets high above their heads. And Cate saw the look on Lucy’s face and watched, helpless, as Lucy pulled out her ropes and strapped herself on, and then she was climbing away from her, and Cate stood earthbound, heavyhearted, as Lucy climbed up into green and light.