Best of all, it could begin to pay dividends long before anything actually happened. Lotte’s crack about getting some had been an opening on her part—a bid to connect with her mother, woman to woman. There weren’t that many levels on which they could really have a relationship. Obviously they were mother and daughter and they would always have that. But in terms of things that they had in common, ways they could relate to each other, there wasn’t much there. Saskia dared to convince herself that Lotte wasn’t sexually active yet. She’d prefer she weren’t. But girls that age had sex all the time, and so it was a thing that Saskia and Lotte could conceivably have in common and bond over. Politics was off the table—Lotte would be horrified and furious when she found out what her mother was up to in Texas—but maybe as that door was closing this other one could open.