Either this was all an elaborate show of being cool, or else he hadn’t realized she’d been gone for seven nights, and that seemed impossible.

But that was all. He halved an avocado, pried out the pit, filled each half with ahi poke, and gave one to Olive.

“Have a beer.”

“Not for me.”

“Wine—I think there’s some in the fridge door.”

“I’ll pass.”

“You joking?”

“I’m off alcohol.”

“You practically killed a bottle yesterday.”

She stared at him with such incomprehension he shrugged and went to the table and began eating, swigging beer, while she watched, not touching her avocado. When he was done he yawned, said, “I’m beat,” and went to bed.

“I’ll put these plates away,” Olive said.

Like that, she moved back in with him.

He was up early the next morning, heading to Sunset to surf—she saw him on her way to the hospital: he was sitting on his board, rocking in the swell, small in the water, with the immensity of the ocean behind him shimmering in the clear dawn light that gave the wide surface of the sea the texture of fish scales.

He was alone on the lift of the wave, still there when it passed, and she slowed her car to watch him. She thought of pulling over to see him take a wave, but she knew his skill and it was enough to see him so solitary, rising and falling on the swell, riding his board as always like a horseman on the steep hill of water, waiting to catch a wave and drop in.

And what after all did she see of his life as a surfer—what did anyone see of the figures rocking in the water? Not much, hardly anything, and so what she knew of this passion of his was negligible. His real life—the life he lived in the waves—was unseen and almost unknowable.

No one onshore, few even in the water, saw the surfer with any accuracy. On a day of good waves she often had trouble picking him out of the lineup of seven or eight bodies, some fighting the boil, others aiming their boards through the crest, a few behind it all bobbing and thrashing, levering their boards into position. They might have been dolphins, alike in their sleekness and size, anonymous in the beauty of their movement in the rough water and the whiteness of the wind-blown chop, the grace of their buoyancy.