After high school, Ariel stuck close—college in Bozeman, an apartment with Connie. She was a good girl, a kind girl. She dated vaguely and rarely got in trouble. When Ariel did misbehave, Harry and Polly and Josie and Ned were the people she could call. Ned and Harry plucked Ariel out of a high school party during senior year and waited quietly while she threw up in an alley behind the Methodist church. Polly rescued her when Ariel, busted at an under-eighteen party in Bozeman, panicked and told the police Polly was her mother.

But Ariel was mostly a cautious girl, sometimes to her detriment. Prepping for a catering one night, drinking wine with Polly, she’d said she’d never gone out with anyone she’d been in love with. All the boys she’d dated had been assholes.

“All of them?” asked Polly.

“Maybe I didn’t know them well enough to be sure,” said Ariel. “All of them so far.”

A little humor, a little bravado. She was still dabbling, thought Polly. But had she been in love?

Maybe, said Ariel. Maybe she was now, but Polly would laugh at the name.

Tell me, said Polly.

Nope, said Ariel. I’ll be over it in no time.

The lack of bullshit, the frank doubt, impressed Polly, who’d always seen life, love, the whole mess as a war of possibilities and had never wanted to consider the bad odds. At Ariel’s age in New York, Polly hadn’t paused to think. They were talking in late May; they’d run down to the Yellowstone with the wagon to make the children happy after dinner, after wine, to see if the river had risen during the day. Polly’s curly dark hair was beginning to hide her scar, and she was giddy, trotting along the muddy dike. In the spring, even in years when there was little chance of flooding, it was hard not to believe that all the water in the world wasn’t rushing down toward them. Freshly ripped trees, a broken pelican tumbling through the muddy chocolate water. Or maybe a swan, but the flash of yellow-orange from a beak or feet seemed too large. Ariel was sunburnt that day. It made her even unhappier in her skin, but she was beautiful to all of them.