He said, “You shouldn’t have stuffed me like a fat Italian sausage. I’ll be a whale in bed.”

“Nonsense. It was a light meal, and you’ll be what you were last night, which is everything a girl could ask.”

“But it’s been a long, warm, sticky day. I’m a poster boy for the tragedy of body odor.”

She plucked her napkin off her lap and set it aside and got up from her chair and rounded the table and sat on his lap. “That’s easily fixed. We’ll take a shower together, soap each other up, and go to bed as fresh as ever we were.” She held his face between her hands and kissed him. “Let’s not waste an evening, Davey. Let’s never say ‘tomorrow,’ because all we ever have is the moment. People think there’s a future, but there really isn’t, not if we want to be totally honest with ourselves. There’s the past, which we might wish desperately that we can change, and there’s now. If we don’t seize the now with all our might, it becomes just another part of the past that we end up wishing we could change.”

She kissed him again and led him to the shower. He convinced himself there was no reason to resist; this was the only way things could be; this was good and true, as much an expression of trust and hope as it was a surrender to need. If she was right and this moment was all they really had, then it was precious beyond valuing. But if what he wished for might come to pass, if all of the mysteries would clarify and the suspicions prove unwarranted, if they could have a few decades together, then this was a commitment to their future.

No less than in Montecito, earlier in the day, on a profound level deeper than the subconscious, deeper than mere intuition or instinct, David knew that she was somehow Emily. His soul recognized hers, and doubt had no place in matters spiritual.

In the act, when they were one, when the fresh scent of her was all that he could smell, when the sight of her was the only reality that his eyes would admit, when there was no sound in all the world but her quickening breath and small cries of rapture, when his senses were saturated with her, he said three times aloud what he had not previously been able to say to Maddison—“I love you”—and in so saying, spoke the truth of his heart.