“It gets you thinking, a universe like that. You start to figure how small you are. How short your time underneath the sky.”

“Sam—”

“Irene, I’m going to do it. I’m going to divorce her. Soon as we get back stateside. Before you ask, it’s got nothing to do with anything but me and her. I just can’t go on the way things are.”

“But how? Won’t she do the same thing she did before?”

“I’ve been thinking about that. I figure I should clear some dough from this little adventure, once we get back. Write a book, make some speeches. I’ll make her an offer she can’t refuse.”

“What about your daughter?”

“She can’t keep me from Pixie, no matter how she tries,” he said, with determination. “I’ll hire the best lawyer around to see to that. If I have to, I’ll take Pixie myself. I don’t like to take a girl from her mother, but a mother like that . . . I don’t know. What do you think?”

“I think a girl’s going to love her mother, whatever happens.”

He put his head in his hands. Irene reached out to cover his knee.

“Sam. You know if there’s anything I can do.”

“Anything you can do?” He lifted his head and looked at her. “You know I’m in love with you, don’t you? You know if I could wave a wand and it would be the three of us, you and me and Pixie—”

“No, don’t.”

“—I’d do whatever I could to wave that wand. Because that would be heaven for me. To have you both. I’d give up anything for that.”

“No, you wouldn’t. You wouldn’t give up flying.”

“If I had to, though?”

“I’d never ask you to,” Irene said, without thinking, and Sam turned and seized her hands.

“What are you saying?” he said. “What are you telling me, Irene?”

“Nothing! You’ve got a wife, Sam.”

“Then just tell me you care. Say that I’m not the only one of us lying here at night, burning up with love for somebody who isn’t mine.”

Well, what could Irene say to that? She wasn’t the kind of woman who could lie outright. She wasn’t the kind of woman who could move in on another woman’s husband, either. She was stuck. Stuck in more ways than one, remember, since it was just the two of them on an island in the middle of the Pacific, no one to know or care what went on in that particular moment, whether they kissed or did not, confessed their hearts or did not, made love in the darkness or did not. Just Sam and Irene and whatever God was paying attention at the time.