He thought about a young Maggie building clay figures, and the image made him smile. He wondered if Maggie had had stripy hair and funny T-shirts back then; he wouldn’t put it past her. Then he thought about Joy, hiking up here, knowing that if Maggie fell ill or scraped her knee or broke her finger it would be up to Joy and only Joy to take care of her. It must have been difficult and sometimes scary for Joy to hoe that lonely row alone.

His thoughts turned to Cassie. “Look at Mommy,” Cassie said once, trying to get Max’s attention for a photo at the playground. And Anthony found himself standing just off to the side, saying, “Look at Daddy!” They weren’t working together. They were competing, volleying Max back and forth like a tennis ball.

In the final, rotten days of their cohabitation he and Cassie had given up saying hello to each other—they’d let go of all of the casual niceties that you’d bestow upon a virtual stranger. Cassie had begun to speak to him through Max: Look at that, Max! Daddy is having another drink. He started to do it back: Max, is Mommy just getting back from meeting with her art dealer? That meeting took a very long time. Obviously the barbs from their words flew over Max’s head, but it wasn’t fair or right for either of them to throw them.

“Look!” cried Joy. “Down on the beach. See that? It’s a baby harbor seal.”

Grateful for the interruption, Anthony steeled himself and looked down. He imagined that he was swaying, then falling. He reprimanded himself. All he could see was a gray lump of rocks. “I don’t see it,” he said, unbelieving.

Joy pointed. “There!”

He saw just the lumpy rocks. He peered and squinted. At last one of the rocks began to move toward the water, and it turned out it wasn’t a rock at all. “What do you know,” he said. The seal seemed awkward and uncomfortable, like a slug with flippers, though it moved quite quickly. “How old is it?” he asked. “Is it old enough to be out on its own?” He felt concerned for the seal.

Joy chewed her lip. “Probably over six weeks, at least. If the mother isn’t with it. After around that age, the baby sticks with the mother, but the mother mostly ignores it.” Almost under her breath she added, “Which is the opposite of my experience.”

“How do you know so much about seals?”

She shrugged—she looked delightfully sexy when she shrugged, and he felt his pulse race. “The harbor seal is our state mammal,” she said. “Knowing the details is in the residency requirements.”

They stood on top of the bluff and watched the seal’s progress. There was something so optimistic about its shifting, unrefined locomotion that Anthony felt a sudden spring of hope. You go, girl, he thought. He was guessing at the gender, but the sentiment was exact. Shouldn’t they all, once beached, get the chance to make their way back to the water? Shouldn’t he? He had made a mistake he’d been led to believe was unforgivable. But maybe it wasn’t. Maybe, in fact, forgiveness could take an unexpected form. The seal—bumbling, yes, but stalwart and somehow proud—was a testament to possibilities. He reached for Joy’s hand and realized that she was reaching for his at the same time. The vertigo he felt now wasn’t uncomfortable or frightening so much as it was bracing, restorative.