“Enough making out,” Tully said, grabbing her arm. “What we need are margaritas. Johnny, bring them to us on the deck.”

Kate let herself be led outside. Once there, she smiled at her friend. “Thanks, Tul. I don’t know why I didn’t just ask for help.”

“Are you kidding? I love bossing Johnny around.” She sat down into the nearest Adirondack chair. In front of them, just beyond the ragged yard, lay a silvery ribbon of foamy surf. The quiet, whooshing sound of the water’s rise and fall filled the night.

Kate sat in the chair beside her.

Johnny returned, gave them each a drink, and left again.

After a long silence, Tully said, “I say this because I love you, Katie: you don’t have to go to every field trip and bake sale. You need to make time for yourself.”

“Now tell me something I don’t know.”

“I read the magazines and watch television. At-home moms are forty percent more likely to—”

“No. I mean it. Tell me something I don’t know. Something fun.”

“Did I tell you about Paris at the turn of the millennium? And I don’t mean the fireworks. There was this guy, a Brazilian . . .”

On the first of July 2000, Tully’s alarm clock went off, as it did every weekday morning, at three-thirty. With a groan, she smacked the snooze button, wishing just this once she could sleep for ten more minutes, and snuggled back up against Grant. She loved waking up near his arms, although she rarely woke in them. They were each too solitary to meld well, even in sleep. In the years of their on again/off again relationship, they’d been all over the world together, attended dozens of glittering parties and black-tie charity events. The press had dubbed him Tully’s “sometime love” and she had always thought it was as apt a nickname as any. Lately, though, she’d been reconsidering.

He wakened slowly, rubbed her arm. “Morning, love,” he said in the scratchy, raspy voice that meant he’d smoked cigars last night.

“Am I?” she asked quietly, angling up onto one elbow.

“Are you what?”

He stopped just short of rolling his eyes, but the effect was the same. “That talk again? You’re thirty-nine. I know. It doesn’t change who we are, Tully. Let’s not ruin a good thing, shall we?”

He acted as if she’d asked him to marry her, or knock her up; neither of which was true. She rolled out of bed and walked through her spacious apartment toward the bathroom. There, she turned on the lights.

“Oh, God.”

She looked like she’d slept in a Dumpster. Her hair, cut short now and highlighted with blond streaks, stuck out all around her face in a way that only Annette Bening or Sharon Stone could pull off, and the bags under her eyes were carry-on-sized.