Then as he turned to go back to the house he saw her walking slowly along the cliff top about a quarter of a mile away. Weak with relief, he ran to overtake her; before he caught up, she sensed a presence and turned.

“Hello,” he said.

“Hello, Adam.”

“What happened to the sandbar?”

“It’s shifted about a quarter of a mile. Toward Provincetown. Sometimes the winter tides do that.”

She started to walk in the direction of the shack and he walked along with her. Later in the season there would be berries here. The plants crushed by their feet filled the air with blueberry spice.

“Oh, Adam, why did you have to come? You should have let it break off swift and clean, without . . . this.”

“Let’s go inside and sit down and talk.”

“I don’t want to go inside.”

“Then get in the car. We’ll take a ride.”

They went to the Plymouth, but he held the door for her on the passenger’s side and got behind the wheel himself.

He drove without speaking for a while, back to the highway and then north.

“I talked to Dr. Williams,” he said.

“Oh.”

“I have a number of things to say to you. I want you to listen carefully.” But he didn’t know what came next, he had never loved one of them before, and he found suddenly that love made a difference in contemplating impending death as well as in bed. God, he prayed, panic-stricken, I’ve changed my mind, from now on I’ll think of every patient as someone I love, only help me to say the right words now.

She looked out the window.

“If you knew I might be killed in an automobile accident, would you refuse yourself the precious time that was left with me?” It sounded weak even to him, somehow patronizing and not at all what he had been trying to say. He saw that her eyes were bright but she would not allow herself to cry.

“Dr. Williams told me you tried to pin him down on a prediction. In your type of case you could easily live out your normal span. We can have fifty years together.”

“Or one, Adam? Or none?”

“Or one. That’s right. Maybe you have just one more year to live,” he said flatly. “But damn it all, Gaby, don’t you see what that means today? This is the edge of the golden age. They’re already taking the human heart out of one body and transplanting it into another. And kidneys, and corneas. Now the lungs and the liver. They’re working on a little machine that will be taking the place of the heart in a very short time. For a patient today, every week is a very long time. Somewhere in this world a team of people is making progress on every important problem you can think of.”

“Including aplastic anemia?”