Boone was late getting to the restaurant, which annoyed me. I sat at the bar, with the drink I’d at least managed to buy myself, watching people chat and laugh and dig into their calamari and polenta and fish tacos. There were places in Marin that could make you believe the whole world was made up of happy people delighting in a night on the town.

“Sorry.” Here was Boone, appearing at my elbow. “It took forever to get across the bridge. Let’s find a table.” He was wearing another of his white-man dress-up outfits.

Every time I saw him, I had to adjust to how much older than me he was, and how unsettling that could be, like maybe we’d met online and one of us had lied about our age. And there was his imperfect resemblance to Viridian as well, so that it seemed I was always looking at his face as if doubting what I saw. He unsettled me for reasons that were really not fair of me to hold against him. The hostess led us to our table, and I wished I’d said I wanted to stay at the bar. The truth behind all those happy-looking restaurant people was that at least some of them weren’t sure they wanted to be with each other.

But here we were. “How are you?” he said, then rubbed at his eyes and stifled a yawn.

“Sorry. Jesus, I can’t do anything right. Kind of short on sleep lately.” He did look tired. All the lines in his face sagging downward. His dark eyes were bloodshot.

I said I was fine. I asked him how Viridian was, and Boone said she was the same, at least as far as he could tell. Maybe the doctors, with their systems for measuring eye movement or pain response, could find something different. She was going to be moved to a care facility in San Rafael maybe as early as a couple of days from now, depending on about a million different crazy-making factors. The money was a nightmare, of course.

“This has to be so hard for you.”

“Yes, except for—” The waitress came by then with menus and interrupted him, and Boone said we should get some dinner, which I’d been ready to turn down. But it was easier to give in and order a fancy hamburger.

You could see a portion of the harbor from where they’d seated us, the thicket of masts in the middle distance that marked some moored yachts, and a space of open water, and the expensively undeveloped shorelines of Belvedere and Tiburon. The sun was getting low in the sky behind us and the sky took on shades of gold and pink and, right above the waterline, a deeper blue. “Except for what?” I asked, once the waitress had gone.

“Oh, I guess I meant, I feel like I’m finally doing what I ought to be doing. Taking care of her.” He dropped his gaze, maybe embarrassed. Maybe he was one of those men who thought that behaving admirably was a sign of weakness. “Trying to give us a good last chapter.”