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Molly wrapped her arms around herself. She was shaking her head, her red hair a wild halo, corking out in all directions, simply beautiful. The sun, stark against her, turned her hair molten. She didn’t look at him as she said, her voice low and strained, “Just because I saw you naked this morning and just stood there and stared at you, my little heart filled with lust, you think you’ve got to marry me? That doesn’t make any sense, Ramsey. I know what men look like. I’ll admit that you look the best of all the men I’ve ever seen—”

“And how many does that make exactly?”

“Two.”

“You’ve made my day.”

“Two, counting you.”

“I take it back.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve seen lots of pictures, movies with men very nearly nude. You’re as good-looking as the best of them, and you surely know it, you’re not blind.” She stopped suddenly, as if aware in that instant of what was coming unbidden out of her mouth. She pursed her lips, like a pissed-off grade-school teacher. “Just because I can still see you clearly in my head, it won’t do to speak about you at any more length. No, I didn’t mean to use that exact word. It was just a slip of the tongue. Yes, enough about your body.”

That was probably a good thing since he was getting hard and they were in public, and he wanted to laugh. “Okay, that’s fine, at least for now. Incidentally, I didn’t ask you to marry me just because you happened to walk in on me. I was thinking it’s kind of surprising that it hadn’t happened before. Do you think if the shoe had been on the other foot, so to speak, you would have felt compelled to propose to me?”

“Oh, goodness. I would have sunk into the floor. I’m not beautiful like you, Ramsey. I’m so skinny.”

He looked at her face, at her glorious hair, and said, “Don’t you ever speak ill of yourself again. It really pisses me off.”

She swallowed, looked down at her feet. “It’s just the truth.”

“Bullshit.” He looked back at the sun, getting lower now. He said, not looking at her, “Sit down. I don’t want you to miss this.”

“Then you shouldn’t have said what you said at such a precious moment. It beat out the setting sun for sheer drama.”

“I thought putting the two precious moments together was a bang-up idea.”

Molly looked at Emma, who was playing now with the two children, the parents looking on. Molly waved to them. The woman waved back.

She sat back down, slowly, carefully, as if she were wearing a dress that he could look up if she wasn’t careful. She sat Indian style, her palms flattened on her thighs. Her fingernails were short, blunt, like his. She was wearing black jeans and black half-boots. Her vivid yellow windbreaker was billowing out behind her as the stiff offshore early-evening winds swept in.

She didn’t look at him, just stared at that bright red sun that was close enough to the water now to turn it a gleaming golden red. “Have you ever been married before, Ramsey?”

Getting down to it now, he thought. “Yes, when I was twenty-two and just starting law school.”

Her voice cynical, she said, “You knocked her up?”

“Nope. She was a marine, had just finished her basic training and was going to be shipped out to some god-awful place in Africa. We wanted to be married just before she left.”

“What happened?”

“We did well together. She was the one always on the road, off to someplace I’d never heard of, but it worked out okay. She wanted to wait on kids and I was agreeable. Then it was all over.” He found his body tensing, becoming clammy, just as it had that day he’d walked out of the courtroom, elated because he’d just won an important case, only to have one man and one woman, both in uniform, waiting for him. He’d known, oh yes, he’d known in that instant that Susan was dead.

“She was killed when her helicopter crashed in the Kuwaiti desert at the end of the Gulf War in ninety-one. She would have shipped home the very next week.”

“I’m sorry,” Molly said, “I’m so very sorry.”

“Shit happens.”

She laid her hand on his arm. “No, don’t act like a man about it.”

There was clean anger in his voice as he turned to her.