The novel provides the reader with two women who have very different ideas about the best way to experience the present moment. Bella better exemplifies this perspective; she lives her life in a way that she feels is authentic to her feelings and desires. Dannie, on the other hand, lives her life in a way that she feels will best usher in the future she hopes to achieve.

Each woman exerts gentle pressure on the other to come closer to the middle of this spectrum. For Bella, this pressure involves encouraging Dannie to temper her drive and ambition with space and time for pleasure in the present. She does this by folding Dannie as much as she can into her life of travel and art and emotional risk. Ironically, Dannie sees these glimpses as transactional in nature; Bella allows Dannie to participate in the overflow of her whimsical, magical life, while Dannie sees herself as using her own more cautious and pragmatic lifestyle to provide a strong and stable foundation for Bella’s flights of fancy.

For Dannie, the value of the present is the opportunity it presents to craft the future. Repeatedly she insists that she and David are working towards something that will be stable, calm, and fulfilling.