“He hadn’t seen her in twenty years. But, okay, I’ll be somebody else.” He buried his face in her hair. God, she smelled fine. Her barely-perceptible breath quickened as he kissed her neck and her fine pulse made little hammer blows on his lips. The boat rose and fell on tiny waves that came to them from the river mouth a few miles away and lapped under the dock.

“Ah, Adam,” she said between kisses. “Adam Silverstone, who are you now? Who are you really?”

“Find out and let me know,” he told her.

The mosquitoes drove them inland. He helped her to fold the blanket and they stowed it in her car, a battered blue 1963 Plymouth convertible parked off Storrow Drive. They walked to a cafeteria on Charles Street and sat at a table against the wall and drank coffee.

“Was it a case that kept you at the hospital?”

He told her about Grigio. She was a good listener; she asked intelligent questions.

“I’m not afraid of fire or drowning,” she said.

“That means you are afraid of something.”

“We’ve had a lot of cancer. On both sides of the family. My grandmother just died of it.”

“I’m sorry. How old was she?”

“Eighty-one.”

“I’d settle for that.”

“Well, so would I. But my Aunt Louisa, for instance. A young, beautiful woman. I’d hate to die before I was old,” she said. “Do a lot of hospital patients die? High numbers, I mean?”

“On a ward like ours, a few a month. In our service, if a month goes by without a death, the Chief Resident or the Surgical Fellow throws a party.”

“Do you give lots of parties?”

“No.”

“I couldn’t do what you do,” she said. “I couldn’t watch the pain and the dying.”

“There’s more than one way to die. Plenty of pain to watch in psychology, isn’t there?”

“Sure, in clinical. That’s why I’m going to end up testing sweet little boys to see why they won’t come out from under the bed.”

He nodded, smiling.

“What’s it like to watch somebody die?”

“I remember, the first time . . . I was a student. There was this man . . . Well, I saw him on my rounds. He was simply fine, laughing and joking. While I was fixing his I.V. his heart stopped. We tried everything in the book to bring him back. I remember looking at him and asking myself, ‘Where did it go? What was it that went away? What turned him from a person into . . . this?”

“God,” she said. Then, “I’ve got this lump.”

“What?” he said.

She shook her head.

But he had heard. “Where?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“For Christ’s sake,” he said. “I’m a doctor, remember?” Probably the breast, he thought.