“When? What day was it?”

“Just over three years ago. The ninth of September 1944.”

“I was in Paris.” I stare in wonder at the horizon and think of the Hotel Scribe, of the journey out to the Orly air base in a Jeep driven by the jittery eighteen-year-old GI assigned to me by the Allied command. I cross my legs together, just like Irene’s, and tell her, “I met Raoul Velázquez a few days later. On the eleventh.”

“Ah,” she says softly. “Ah. Of course.”

“Of course?”

Irene turns to me. “There was a storm the night before. I remember listening to the wind and the rain and thinking Sam would want to surf in the morning, when the weather had cleared but the waves would be coming in like mountains. And sure enough, when I woke, he was already gone. He left a note to say he would be back in time to take the children to school.”

“But he wasn’t.”

“No. As soon as I saw the note, I had this terrible feeling. I told myself it was silly, that Sam was indestructible, but when he hadn’t returned by ten o’clock I knew something was wrong. The funny thing is, I thought he had cracked up the airplane. I never thought the ocean would take him. But when I landed here, his ship was sitting on the grass, just fine. The sun was glinting on the fuselage. I found his shoes and towel and things on the sand. I sat down next to them and waited. Waited and waited. You see, he had promised me.”

“Promised you what?”

“That he would die in my arms. Isn’t that ridiculous?” She laughs softly. “Ridiculous and sentimental. I thought he couldn’t be dead, because he’d sworn to God he would die in my arms, and nowhere else.”

We’re silent for a moment, contemplating the rhythms of the surf, and then I ask her how long she waited. Whether anything of him ever turned up.

“No. Not a thing. As if the ocean just swallowed him. It was Olle who came looking for me, in the afternoon. He took care of everything for me. I was destroyed. I only held myself together at all because of the children, and because Olle wouldn’t let me alone.” She laughs again. “So I married him out of gratitude, I think. And maybe because I was so mad at Sam for dying.”

“Mad? You were mad at him?”

“Of course I was. Weren’t you? I was furious. For throwing himself away like that, when we loved him so much. For making us wake up every morning and find a way to go on without him.”