“It was the Realtor in Provincetown,” she said calmly. “He gave me what I think is a very fair price. Twenty-four thousand. He says he’ll make only three thousand dollars on the turnover and I believe him.”

“Tell him you’ve had a talk with your husband and you’ve decided not to sell.”

“No,” she said.

“I’m aware what that place means to you. You want your children to know it.”

“Let them find their own love nests,” she said.

“Gaby, I can’t let you.”

She understood him so completely now. “I’m not keeping you, Adam. I’m your wife. You’ve learned to give to me, but taking from me is harder, isn’t it?”

She took his hand and pulled him down to where she was sitting. He put his face between her breasts; the old Radcliffe jersey smelled of turpentine and sweat and the body he knew so well. Looking down, he could see on her bare foot an imperfect circle of dried white paint that he reached for and peeled away. My God, I love her, he thought wonderingly. Her skin was fading. She had given up the sunlamp when she became pregnant, and now as the summer progressed his wife was turning lighter in inverse proportion to the rate other people tanned.

He touched the warm, round stomach. “Aren’t these jeans too tight?”

“Not yet. But I won’t be able to wear them much longer,” she said a trifle smugly.

Please, he thought. Let me give to her and receive from her for a very long time.

“I know it won’t be the same, but some day I’ll get you another place down there.”

“Don’t make promises,” she said, stroking his head, the only time she was tempted to mother him. “My Adam. Growing up hurts like hell, doesn’t it?”

He was slightly late getting to the hospital but it was a quiet evening and he spent the first hour in his office. He had been working toward this shift for weeks and almost all the clinical reports had been completed. Now he annotated the last of the case histories and realized that twelve months of his life were on paper in these files.