The first time she meets the kid, on a walk through Central Park with her old bud, the kid shares a personal story and she’s funny and real and she cries so the wife gives the kid a tissue and tells her she’s awesome but holds back an impulse to tell her that she loves her. She doesn’t want to freak the kid out, this kid doesn’t really know her, this is her dad’s old friend she met one time when the kid was twelve. She’s eighteen now, casually cool, all big sweatshirts and sneakers and high-waisted jeans and scrunchies, which are back, and she can lip-synch to a Drake song like nobody’s business; in the summers she goes to some outdoorsy camp and mentors young girls and goes on ice climbing/canoeing/we don’t even know what kind of expeditions in Alaska and Michigan and places, plus she writes, and wants to do sixteen other things with her life and we’re pretty sure the ice-climbing kid can accomplish whatever the hell else she wants. At this point the wife can barely navigate a sidewalk free of ice without risk of breaking a bone, and when they say goodbye, the kid hugs her and says I love you and she says I love you too, and then she feels like a dope, an elated dope, for not having said it first.