They had reached the age where you couldn't tell by looking who had had babies and who hadn't. Carmody and Kim, who hadn't, wore sarongs around middles gone doughy from expensive Chardonnay; Whitney's yoga and Ra's nunnish sobriety had smoothed over the imprint of past pregnancies. It had been over a decade since they'd been together, and that long since a stretch mark had meant anything. Source of shame or badge of honor.

Orbiting the swim-up bar, they watched the bride—lissome, flaxen-haired—play with her friends in the Atlantic. Three carats of diamonds and peachy-orange sapphire twinkled on her hand in the afternoon sun.

"Thirty-one," said Whitney.

"Thirty-two," countered Carmody.

Ra squinted, taking in the bride's sapling thighs and the smooth skin along her torso. "Twenty-six," she said finally.

Kim plunked a tiny glass on the bar in front of Ra. "She's twenty-seven. Chug!"

They all watched as Ra grimaced and sipped. Chugging was only for films about chicks on vacation.

"Twenty-freaking-seven," Kim repeated. The words sparked a vulgarly sensory memory in each of them. They clutched their tumblers of watery blue curaçao. The drink went down like Kool-Aid, which meant you could start drinking at brunch and carry on until bedtime, barely buzzed. With the wedding a day away, Kim had forged a strategic partnership with the bartender stationed nearest the laureled pergola. She twitched her fingers and he strode by and shook a half-ounce of rum into her glass as he passed.

"If you were twenty-seven," started Whitney, giggling. She waved a hand toward the hotel, in which the groom slept off the previous night's Dionysian festivities. "If you were twenty-seven, could you be with him?"

Laughter from the others. The groom was a paunchy father of four, an overclose talker with a braying laugh, and—with the exception of Kim, his younger sister—each had passed him over twenty-five years ago.

Although. In quiet moments, sometimes even in Savasana, Whitney let her mind sink into the shapeless memory of a hundred aggregated campus parties, her hopes cresting each time he laughed at one of her Tarantino references. Carmody tracked him closely on LinkedIn, a little fire building within each time his progress outpaced hers. Ra had incorporated him into the shorthand she shared with her therapist: his name as metonymy for the rejections of cis white men.

Still, azure drinks in hand, they could contentedly ignore his little bride, her golden hair and glittering skin. No hard feelings. Those thoughts were as far away as the clamor of their defiant children and business calendars. The other side of the Florida Straits, too distant to be heard.

Only Kim caught herself staring. That Padparadscha sapphire, once her grandmother's. A juicy, dazzling gem, its color almost lewd, too big for the bride's skinny finger. Their mother had been its custodian for years, and until now Kim hadn't gotten around to wondering what might be planned for it. And now it was too late.

Here was the bartender again, winking, offering rum. "One more?"

But Kim had her brother's children to get back to in the hotel, another twenty-four hours of corralling and minding while their father prepared for his life to begin. She returned the wink but shook her head, No more, and placed a hand over her glass.

.