“I’d better be going,” she said.

“Where?”

“Does it matter?”

“It does to me.”

She looked at him with sudden anger. “What did you think, that I’d stay on here? That we’d go on playing games?”

“I’d like you to stay,” he said.

“So you can work on me? Sort of help me along, give me handy little shoves—all the way to the courthouse?”

“That wouldn’t be my only reason.”

“What else?”

“You know what else.”

“No I don’t. Tell me.”

She stood there waiting, meeting his eyes, but he could not give the half-truth even half a life. So she let him go then, let her eyes drop him and move on to her clothes, which she gathered up, including the soiled things he had rinsed out the night before. She went into the bathroom and closed the door.

While she was gone Hook dressed slowly, putting on the one pair of slacks he had left after his ocean swim, then a white shirt and tie, and his old gray herringbone sport coat. All the while he tried to think what he could do to keep her with him, but there was nothing except to try again to persuade her. And if that failed, he did not know what else there was except to tag along after her, make a nuisance of himself, keep pounding at her until he made her see that she could not leave the thing where it was.

When she came out finally she was wearing the tan pantsuit again. She had combed out her hair and put on a touch of eyeliner, and she looked beautiful, austere, Iberian.

“Thanks for cleaning this,” she said. “I thought I’d have to go home in just my raincoat.”

“You hungry?” he asked.

“I’ll eat at home.”

“Why not with me? Certainly that couldn’t spoil your plans for the day.”

“I have no plans.”

“Good, then.”

“Except to be by myself. And away from you.”

Hook nodded, as if in agreement. “All right. Fine. But a few minutes for breakfast won’t hurt anything. Please, Liz.”

For five or six seconds she stood there looking at him, as if he were a pane of glass. Then she shrugged.

As they got into his car, Liz suggested they go to Moby Dick’s, so Hook drove down the beach and turned onto the wharf and they clattered slowly out over the planks past the Harbor Restaurant and the fish shops and workboat facilities to the small café situated near the end of the structure. Inside, Hook ordered a breakfast steak and scrambled eggs, with hashed brown potatoes and toast and orange juice—so much that he got a smile of embarrassment out of Liz, who settled for coffee and toast.

“I must be a weakening influence,” she said.

Hook grinned. “Could be that. Then too, I haven’t eaten since yesterday morning.”

“Then that’s it. I’m not guilty.”

They both had left their sunglasses on because it was bright where they were sitting, at a corner table next to the window. The day outside was brilliant and clear, the sea alternately dazzling or deep blue depending on the slant of the waves. A quarter-mile in was the beach and the palm-lined drive, then the city rising toward the foothills, and finally the mountains in the distance, so clear Hook could make out trees along their crest, a serration of conifers, like the spine of a stegosaurus. Closer, just a few feet beyond the window, seagulls as fat as geese sailed back and forth, looking to become even fatter. But it was across the harbor that Hook’s attention focused, on the yacht basin with its forest of masts and flybridges, one of them on the Skipjack.