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Grace was born and had loved every minute. True, a lot of the less lovable minutes had been delegated to Elsa, their Jamaican nanny, who remained to this day the linchpin of their domestic life.
    Like many ambitious women of her generation, Annie had been determined to prove the compatibility of motherhood and career. But while other media mothers used their work to promote this ethic, Annie, had never flaunted it, shunning so many requests for photo spreads of her with Grace that women's magazines soon stopped asking. Not so long ago she had found Grace flipping through such a piece about a TV anchor-woman, proudly pictured with her new baby.
    'Why didn't we ever do this?' Grace said, not looking up. Annie answered, rather too tartly, that she thought it was immoral, like product placement. And Grace had nodded thoughtfully, still not looking at her. 'Uh-huh,' she said, matter-of-fact, flipping on to something else. 'I guess people think you're younger if you make out you haven't got kids.'
    This comment and the fact that it was uttered without a trace of malice had given Annie such a shock that for several weeks she thought of little else than her relationship with Grace or, as she now saw it, her lack of one.
    It hadn't always been so. In fact until four years ago when she'd taken her first editorship, Annie had prided herself that she and Grace were closer than almost any mother and daughter she could think of. As a celebrated journalist, more famous than many of those she wrote about, her time until then had been her own. If she so chose, she could work from home or take days off whenever she wanted. When she traveled, she would often take Grace with her. Once they'd spent the best part of a week, just the two of them, at a famously fancy hotel in Paris, waiting for some prima donna fashion designer to grant Annie a promised audience. Every day they walked miles shopping and sightseeing and spent the evenings guzzling delicious room service in front of the TV, snuggled in a gilded, emperor-size bed like a pair of naughty sisters.
    Executive life was very different. And in the strain and euphoria of transforming a stuffy, little-read magazine into the hottest read in town, Annie had at first refused to acknowledge the toll it was taking at home. She and Grace now had what she proudly referred to as 'quality time'. From her present perspective, its main quality seemed to Annie to be oppression.
    They had one hour together in the mornings when she forced the child to do her piano practice and two hours in the evening when she forced her to do homework. Words intended as motherly guidance seemed increasingly doomed to be taken as criticism.
    At weekends things were better and the horse riding helped keep intact what fragile bridge there remained between them. Annie herself no longer rode but, unlike Robert, had from her own childhood an understanding of the peculiar tribal world of riding and showjumping. She enjoyed driving Grace and her horse to events. But even at its best, their time together never matched the easy trust that Grace shared with Robert.
    In a myriad minor ways, it was to her father that the girl first turned. And Annie was by now resigned to the notion that here history was inexorably repeating. She herself had been her father's child, her mother unwilling or unable to see beyond the pool of golden light encircling Annie's brother. Now Annie, with no such excuse, felt herself propelled by pitiless genes to replicate the pattern with Grace.
    The train slowed in a long curve and came to a halt in Hudson and she sat still and looked out toward the restored veranda of the platform, with its cast-iron pillars. There was a man standing exactly where Robert normally waited and he stepped forward and held out his arms to a woman with two small children who had just climbed down from the train. Annie watched him hug each of them in turn, then shepherd them toward the parking lot. The boy insisted on trying to carry