“I don’t mean that. You have to eat better. You need to spend more time in the water. You have to be buoyant.”

One of his unshakable beliefs was that to be healthy a person needed to be immersed, floating, tossed by waves, twisting beneath them, reliving the ancient memory of our ancestry as sea creatures, recreating that life and evolution by spending part of every day in the water. And in the late afternoon, the sunset blazing in the distance, swimming to shore and flopping in the shore break and scrabbling in the boils of foam and the lacework of bubbles, until finally, streaming with water, crawling onto the sand and creeping up the beach. It was his daily ritual, a celebration of his being a waterman.

“Take some time off. Get into the water.”

“I’ve got some sick days coming to me.”

“You need some water,” he said. He was still driving. He reached for her leg and squeezed it gently.

But the deftness could only have come from many years of practice. How often in a car with a woman has that gesture served him, she thought—the reach, the squeeze, the click of his tongue on his teeth? A man winking at her had always made her sigh and turn away.

So she was surprised when he kept his attention on her. That night and thereafter she became the embodiment of the child for him. He seemed to treat her with the tender love that he had for the child to come. Holding her, he was holding the baby, and all the fear she’d had in telling him the news vanished. He was a different man, a hopeful one, thinking of someone other than himself. And she was different too, incredibly, soon to be a mother. That gave her joy and a sense of power she had not known before. Already she felt a throb of new vitality; she was strong.

She had not expected him to take such an interest, but he did, he was inquisitive and full of advice, seeming to take possession of the child while the little thing was not yet a bump in her belly. The child, so far, was her nausea, her dizziness, her feeling in the morning that (having drunk no alcohol at all) she had a hangover.