The sun sat quietly over the water when they pulled in, as if it were waiting for them. Daniel thanked the driver and took down his cell phone number. “I might need to call you on short notice,” he explained in his odd Spanish. He’d overpaid so dramatically, he seemed to know the young man would do what he could.

“Anytime,” the man said.

Daniel found the key under the flowerpot, as he’d arranged with the rental office.

“How did you plan all this?” she asked. “How did you know what would happen?”

“I didn’t. I hoped we’d get this far. I wanted to make sure we had a place to go if we did. I’m going to charter a plane out of Colima, probably, but we won’t get out until tomorrow morning.”

It was a whitewashed stucco house with a tile roof under a crown of deep orange bougainvillea. He unlocked the door and pushed it open. She felt the ocean air that filled the house. It had a big, highceilinged central room open to a terrace and the beach just beyond, with two fans spinning overhead. The kitchen was at the back, open to the big room. On either side was a bedroom, both of them simple and pretty.

As they wandered around the little house they kept looking at each other, and she wondered if his sense of disbelief could possibly match hers. What was the category of this adventure? Was he just looking out for her? Would he deposit her safely back home and go back to his life, and that was all it was? A part of her mind kept returning anxiously to the story he’d told her in the car about him and Sophia. He’d left her in a remote village and gone off and gotten killed.

A low wall surrounded the terrace, and without really conferring, they walked over to it and sat down on it side by side to watch the last of the sun. She was still wearing her ridiculous peach-colored housekeeping smock. He was still dressed for the Washington winter. They were both quiet.

She felt her thigh touching his. She couldn’t help being aware that she was not wearing anything under her smock. She’d gone running out of the hotel room in a bathrobe. She had nothing to change into and no ability to think even a few minutes ahead.

Numbly, she stared at the floating dock about fifty yards out. She thought it would be fun to swim to it. That’s the kind of thing they would do if they were on vacation together, she thought wistfully. But they weren’t. She kept wanting to think it, but it wasn’t so. This was a mercy mission to get her away from an old enemy. Daniel was just trying to help her. Maybe he just took pity on her. Maybe it was for old time’s sake. I hope that’s not all it is, she thought.

No matter how it felt to be near him, she had to keep her swollen heart in check. He could have found her long before this if he’d wanted to. She thought of all those years of yearning for him. Why, if he had wanted her anything like the way she had wanted him, hadn’t he come for her sooner?

When the sun dunked under the Pacific Ocean he went to the refrigerator and looked inside. “Can I get you something to drink?” he called to her.

“Thanks. Anything,” she said. “No bourbon.”

“How did he manage to get close to you?” he finally asked her, as though it was the next logical line in a long and somewhat frustrating conversation.

“You mean Joaquim.”

“I really didn’t think he would be able to get close, because of what he did to you when you were his wife. I know it was a long time ago, but usually those feelings stay pretty strong. I thought you’d want to run in the other direction. But I guess I was wrong. Maybe the feelings do fade after a while. Or maybe I just don’t understand the whole picture.”

She put her glass down. She felt his frustration, and she sent some right back. “I did want to run in the other direction, Daniel. And I would have. I struggled to make myself sit next to him. I don’t know how I did it. I felt like gagging when he kissed me. I felt guilty about that at the time, but now when I think of it I not only feel stupid, I want to gag some more.”

“Did you . . . ?” Daniel had a pressing question, and he couldn’t get it out. She knew what it was, and she didn’t feel like helping him.

“Did I what?”

“Did you . . . spend a lot of time kissing him?”

“Not much. No.”

He was embarrassed but stubborn. “Did it go further than kissing him?”

“Is that any of your business?”

“No.”

“Daniel.” She stood up. She felt like shaking him. “I didn’t have sex with him. I wouldn’t let him touch me. I couldn’t stand it. Last night I slept in a chair. Is that what you were trying to ask?”

He nodded, with a look of chagrin. “But why did you go anywhere with him if that’s the way you felt?”

“You know why. Because he told me he was you.”

He shook his head. He was quiet for a moment. “And that seemed to you like a good thing?”

Her eyes were suddenly full. “How can you ask me that?”

He got up the courage to put a finger on her finger, a thumb against her wrist. “The last time I saw you at that party at the end of high school you ran away from me. I understand why. It was my fault, I know. But the last thing you did was to push me away from you. I’ve been trying to stay away, because that’s what you wanted. I didn’t want to cause you more distress. And I didn’t know how to try again and make it right. I didn’t want to ruin what little chance I might someday have with you.”

She wiped at her eye before any tears could get going. “Everything changed since then. I was scared of the things you said, but I was more scared of the way I felt. I started having these . . . visions out of nowhere, and I thought I was going crazy. I kept thinking about them and about the things you said. I wanted to find you, but I thought you were dead. Somebody saw you jump into the Appomattox River.”

He nodded morosely. “I jumped, but I didn’t die.”

“So I gather. But I didn’t know that then. I looked everywhere for you. You have no idea how much I wanted to find you and how much I’ve thought about you these last five years.”

His surprise was not the kind you could fake. “I had no idea.” He was shaking his head slowly. “I wish I’d known.”

“Well, you didn’t know, maybe, but somehow he must have known how desperate I was to see you again. He came up to me at school saying he was you. I didn’t believe it at first. But he knew these things he couldn’t possibly have known otherwise. That’s what I thought, anyway. I’ve learned such unexpected things about the world in the past few years, I don’t know what is possible and what isn’t. The same kinds of mysterious things you said to me at that party, he seemed to know. He said you’d died, which is what I already thought, and had come back in a new body. He even explained this complicated thing of how he went from an old body to a new one.”

Daniel’s face was pained. “That was the only part of what he told you that was true,” he said.

“Is it?”

“Yes.”

“He said he didn’t hurt anybody with it.”

“He hurts people with it,” Daniel said.

She closed her eyes. “I didn’t know that. I didn’t know anything. It scares me the things I told myself. But I would have told myself almost anything, because I wanted to believe him.”

“Why?”

“Because I wanted to be with you.”

Thinking of that, he thought of the way her body looked in it, and then he thought of the way her body looked under it. And then he pictured her unzipping it to go into the water, and then he realized it would no longer be a good idea to strip down to his boxer shorts. He sat there tangled up in his own awkwardness, and the most he could finally do was reach out and hold her hand.

“What happened to you?” she asked, looking at his arm where his sleeve had bunched up.

“What do you mean?”

“These scars.”

“It’s nothing.” He put his sleeve down again.

She lifted it up again. “It doesn’t look like nothing.”

To his astonishment, she bent her head and kissed the burn marks, each of the three, slowly and deliberately. He stared at her. As much as he’d wanted her lips on him, he wished she would leave that part alone.

“I had a tough set of foster parents,” he said quickly. “The mother was a smoker with a bad temper.”

She looked horrified. “Your mother did this to you?”

“She wasn’t my mother. She was just the woman I lived with when I was a kid.” His voice was so dismissive it was rude, but he couldn’t help it.

“Who was your mother, then?”

“The woman who gave birth to me was a heroin addict. I haven’t seen her since I was little. I was too young to really remember her.” He sounded impassive, and he was.

She kissed his arm again. She was sadder about it than he was, and he wished he could make her see.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said to her. “I’ve been through worse. I didn’t care about her. She might have thought she could hurt me, but she couldn’t.”

She lifted her head and looked at him. “How can you say that? How can you say it doesn’t matter? You were a child, and she hurt you. She burned your skin and left scars. Of course it matters. That’s why you hide them.”

He shook his head, suddenly irritated. “I don’t hide them.”

“You do! I don’t care how many times you’ve lived or what you remember, it still hurts. It does matter.”

“Not the way you think.” He felt angry at her. This was not what he wanted to talk about, and he wished she would stop. “I’m different from you, Sophia. That’s the thing. I’m different from everybody. You don’t get that.”

“Oh, I get it, all right.” Her eyebrows came down. “And by the way, I am Lucy. I am right here, and I am Lucy. You are you, and you are not as different as you think. You are this man right here.” She held his arm with two hands. “With this skin and these scars on your arm and your fucked-up mom. That is who we are.”

“You’re wrong.” He glared at her. “We’re more than that.”

She looked mad, and that was fine, he told himself. He would rather she be mad than sympathetic. She provoked him, and he hated her in that moment, but he hated himself most. God, maybe she would run away again. Maybe he’d blown it again. Maybe for a lifetime. Maybe for all lifetimes. It wasn’t meant to work with them, was it? He didn’t know if he could try anymore.

She stared at him for a long time. She was tough when she wanted to be. She put her hands on his shoulders, and he half expected she was going to start shaking him, but she didn’t. She leaned in very close until he could feel her warmth. He felt shaken, and he couldn’t breathe right.

“You know what, Daniel?”

He held his breath. “What?”

This was where she said good-bye and walked out. He didn’t know where she would go, but he felt sure that’s what was coming. He hoped at least she would let him help her get somewhere safe.

“If it doesn’t matter, then this doesn’t matter.” She turned her head to the side and put her mouth to the hollow at the base of his neck and kissed him long and slow. He could feel the moisture. He could feel her tongue.

He was too shocked to respond. He was frozen. He didn’t know what to do. His body was suddenly a mass of throbbing nerves, and his brain didn’t even work.

She pulled away and looked him right in the eyes as she began to unbutton his shirt. In astonishment he watched her as if it were happening to someone else. She pulled the shirt off his shoulders and left it in a pile on the sand behind him. He was breathing hard, but he didn’t dare move.

“If that doesn’t matter, then this doesn’t matter.” She leaned down to his chest and kissed it.

His hands were clenched. He drew in a sharp breath.

“And this doesn’t matter.” She slid her hands around to his back and came up to kiss him on the lips. She kissed him hard, and in a rush like a tide he kissed her back. He didn’t think about anything. He kissed her with all he had, because he couldn’t help it. He couldn’t hold back if he tried. His hands were making their hungry way around her hips when she pulled away from him.

She held him away and looked at him, and his whole big, stupid body just hurt. He physically could not stand to be apart from her any longer. Once started, there was too much to feel. He couldn’t help that, either. He was drowning.

Her eyes were unflinching on him, but they were filled with tears. “Does that not matter?”

She was going to cry, he realized. She was going to cry for him, and he didn’t want her to.

He closed his eyes.

“Daniel, tell me. Does it not matter? Because if it doesn’t, I’ll stop.”

He didn’t want to open his eyes. He felt a tear escape under his eyelid. He couldn’t lie to her. He never had, and he couldn’t now. “Don’t stop.” His voice was barely a whisper.

“Why not?”

He felt as though he would die if he couldn’t touch her. “Because it matters.”

When she kissed him again he was crying, too, for the good and the bad. They were down on the sand, a wet blur of kissing and tears. He didn’t try to make sense of it anymore. He didn’t try to organize it or record it for the long future. This was what he had. It not only mattered, it mattered the most. He kissed her with everything, because loving a person was all you could do.

Time lost its meaning. The regular sequences he kept such careful track of were gone. If anything, the circle of his long existence clicked back to the start and made him new again.

He unzipped her housekeeper smock with aching tenderness and found her naked under there with a burst of unexpected wonder, even though he knew that’s how she would be. He felt as though he’d never seen a woman’s body before, and when he put his hands on her, he felt as though he’d never touched anyone before. He discovered every part of her with his fingers and his mouth as though it was new. He went up every so often to kiss her wet face and look at her eyes and make sure she was still with him. She gave him everything unstintingly.

“I love you,” he whispered to her, and if he’d ever said it before, he couldn’t remember.

After he’d found every part of her, she wound her legs around him and pulled him inside. She clung to him. She held his neck and kissed him damply and fiercely.

He could lose himself in her forever, he thought. He might never come out. She was right here, and she was Lucy. He was this man in this skin, and that was all. Lucy was right. That was all they were.

At last he came and came and came inside her. It was just raw senses. It was a moment big enough to scatter all memory of before and after. Maybe he wouldn’t get to keep it, and that was the thing that always scared him most. But he felt a delirious joy in setting his burdened mind free. He let it all go. The rest of the world and all record of everything that had ever happened to him. He pressed his sweaty body along her beautiful, sweet skin. He curled around her, and he was as raw and new as if he had just been born.