Veronica closed her eyes, trying to silence a voice that had started up in her head. The voice belonged to Lucy, the woman who had given birth to Emily and to her, and with whom Veronica had spent the first fifteen years of her life moving from commune to ashram to beach house to suburb. The day after her fifteenth birthday she left for good. For all that had passed between them, Lucy was her mother and Veronica did love her. She knew that Lucy had done her best, strange and askew as that was. There was nonetheless a great gap between them. Veronica liked to think of Lucy as some more distant relative, like a cousin in a foreign country. Or an occasional voice in her head.