“You just don’t get it, Rand. What that doctor tried to do was courageous! I feel for those poor women she could have helped. Instead they’ll be saddled with motherhood against their will. Having that abortion seventeen years ago was the best thing that ever happened to me. I would have died—died with another child. We could barely make it with Leo. He was, what, nine months when we found out I was pregnant again? I never regretted that abortion, Rand. Let’s be honest, the two of us weren’t meant to have children. Women should have the right. Women should have the right!”

Joey was going to be sick. She glimpsed Leo’s face; it was stone. For a few terrible moments, there was the sound of the clock tower down below. Three quick tocks. Joey wished for tocks forever.

Finally, Rand spoke. “I don’t even know what we’re fighting about.”

The sound of ice cubes clinking against glass. Glass meeting coaster.

“I don’t either, to be honest.” Maisy laughed a normal laugh. Joey hated her for that laugh.

“Okay, honey,” said Rand. “I’m going out on the boat.”

Leo grabbed the sandwiches and slid out the front door. Joey followed him down. She had never known less in her life what to say. So Maisy had had an abortion after Leo. That was bad, but it wasn’t the worst. The worst was the cavalier way she and Rand had framed Leo’s entire life. Like having kids was a burden. Like Leo himself was a burden.

“Are you sure you still want to go to Sidari?” Joey asked as Leo slung his leg over the motorbike.

“Yeah.” He handed her a helmet and buckled his. She got on the back and clutched him around the waist.

As Leo drove north past sea-battered cliffs, Joey finally said his name with a question mark at the end of it. It was chicken to force him to lead the way, but every other thing that occurred to her to say, to defend Maisy or Rand or explain their conversation away, was stupid, and she couldn’t advocate for any of it. But either Leo didn’t hear her speak or he pretended her appeal had been lost in the column of wind.

They drove steeper into the mountains, the morning’s mist suspended over the bucolic countryside, the quiet punctured only by the tinkle of a goat’s bell and the cicadas orchestrating their chorus from orchards of fig trees. If he’d been his normal happy self, Leo would have recited trees. Olive. Myrtle. Strawberry. Kumquat. Judas. Holm oak. When Leo was stumped over a clump of green, Joey always found it endearing when he retrieved his botany book and surfaced sheepishly with, “Just cypresses.”