The waiter reaches for their empty plates. “Are you going to finish?” she asks. He looks down, brow knit in confusion. “College, I mean.”

As soon as it comes out she realizes the mistake, how she sounds like some nagging relative. She can feel a wince, and when she tells herself to smile through it, the result is some sort of grimace. She reaches for her wine.

But then he says, “Maybe,” without any hesitation, and she’s released, all that fussiness and worry gone in a puff of smoke. Thank the wine and his quiet charisma for that. “I think I might start over.”

“Oh?” He keeps doing this thing with his eyes—maybe it’s more eyelashes, or eyebrows, she can’t figure it out yet—but it’s one of the most suggestive, sexy looks she’s ever experienced. “My agent, Herb Allison—you’ve heard of him?”

She nods, of course she has.

“He’s a big architecture buff, got me into it. I think I might do architectural preservation.” The steak arrives, bloody and glistening and almost the size of a second baseman’s glove.

“Really.” Her heart is racing, her head spinning. She never thought she’d be so lucky, to find an athlete who cared about her other passion. “Architecture?”

He butchers their meat, pushing the smaller piece onto her plate before stabbing the rest onto his. “Herb, he’s got one of those Test Case—sorry, Case Study—houses, and convinced me to buy another, just down the street. It’s amazing to inhabit that kind of space. I mean, we all care about our homes, right? But when you’re preserving something of architectural significance—”

“It’s like it’s not really yours,” she says, thinking first of Taliesin but then of her own house, how it looked so spooky without its lights. She notices a tremor as she reaches for her wine and hopes he doesn’t see it. “You’re more of a steward.”

“Exactly. It’s a money pit, but it’s worth it.” It was. He’s chewing like a midwestern boy, elbows on the table, and it makes her smile. “Anyway, I was thinking I could set up a preservation trust, for stadiums or something. Do you think I need a degree for that?”

“Maybe not.” Tami never went to school for Frank Lloyd Wright—she got her GED and took some community college classes, but nothing close to an architectural history course—and she knows as much about organic modernism as anyone working at the house. But then Jason is talking about LACMA’s new pavilion and visiting Frank Gehry’s studio and the Philharmonic’s concert hall, about parabolic arcs and things that have nothing to do with Tami, with this moment. She needs him to come back to her, to Arizona. “You’ve been to Taliesin West, then? I mean, sure Gehry’s great, but the other Frank. He’s the original.”