“For gosh sakes,” he blustered, “do we have to argue about the damn air?”

Deep breath. Times two.

“Okay,” she relented. “Your plans, my alterations. Can you do it?”

“You’re in luck. We’re having a special.”

“What kind of special?”

“The one where we do anything for money.”

She smiled indulgently.

“It’s going to cost a lot if you want it to look good.”

“Mom doesn’t care about money. She’s very well-fixed and still getting royalties from my father’s books. John? Does my mother…could she…have you…?” She gave up, then started over more slowly. “Does she know about that summer?”

“I don’t know how she could. Why?”

“She asked me to ask you if you could either supervise or do most of the work yourself. She also happened to ask me if I couldn’t just marry you and make her life easy.”

He didn’t think that was funny. “Did you tell her we’ve been over all that?”

“Of course not,” she said. “That wouldn’t be true. We never actually talked about marriage. We talked about being together, and even that was too much.”

“Well, one of us was married, if you recall,” he flung back.

She rolled her eyes in irritation. She’d been afraid of this, that he would really make her mad. She tried a change of subject. “You’ve really made something of this operation. The last time I saw it, it was a garage surrounded by a big old cyclone fence.”

“When was that?”

“Oh, I don’t remember the date,” she lied. She remembered exactly. “You weren’t here. You were on your honeymoon.” Nuts. It was no longer going to be all his fault if they moved from general sniping into a full-fledged battle. So much for good intentions.

“My honey—! You came here? No one ever told me you came here!”

“Well, I didn’t leave a message. You weren’t here. You were indisposed, so to speak. So I left. Back to the yard—this whole thing is typical of Jess’s spontaneous—”

“Why did you come here?” he asked.

“I said I would. I said I was going to get things together, straightened out. Don’t you even remember?”

“That isn’t what you said. You said you couldn’t live here with me—I wasn’t challenging enough!”

“Not you. There wasn’t any work for me here. I had to have some kind of—”

“You said you had to go back to Stanford because—”

“Because that’s where I lived. That’s where my job was. My stuff. All my stuff was in Los Altos. I’d been offered a grant—I had to accept a grant to have a job. One of us had to have a job. You were a ski bum who occasionally cut grass for people. Besides, you said you were glad I was going away.”