10.

      FOUR DAYS AFTERWARD, AND ANOTHER MORNING SUN reds Robbie’s eyelids and he clamps them more tightly, trying not to awaken. He feels the chill and tightens his arms around himself. Drifting, as on still water, he tries to descend back. But he can feel the insistence of his bladder now, each discomfort rising like a piece in an orchestra to wake him.

      He opens his eyes, expecting his bedroom. In fact, he’s in his car, in the middle of an empty parking lot. The keys are in the ignition and he starts the car reflexively, pushing up the heater controls. The dashboard clock reads 5:12.

      He thinks backwards two hours. Of rising from Jean’s bed in her condo, telling her he had to go. He was still thinking of that awkwardness with Dawn, of her seeing them out and obviously together, and the unexpected hurt in Dawn’s face. It complicated the night he was having with Jean, who had asked and been told about M., had been asked and had told about her own ex, and had been cheery and chatty until she said to him, “That’s not your ex-wife right over there, is it?” And he looked across the restaurant and there was Dawn, locked in on them from a table with her two girlfriends, who seemed to be trying to draw her back into the conversation.

      “That one’s hard to explain,” he’d said, to which she said, “I hate it when there’s a hard-to-explain one.”

      He could have thumbnailed Dawn as a high-strung ex-girlfriend, and he supposed she is, by most definitions. He felt, though, as if his time with Dawn was a long chain of insistence and surrender, when he thought he might settle into something that was just what it was, with no expectations, a state he then found endlessly impossible. He had thought of Dawn as a Friday-night date while she was trying to get him to meet her family. He had finally begun to think of himself as resolutely single, or more accurately alone, when she was already talking about themselves as a couple. He kept trying to slow her down, to position her to explain. Finally, when it was impossible, he told her so, and she’d tearily decamped to Florida.

      So why was he feeling so guilty, sitting with Jean at a cheap Italian restaurant? The date had seemed train-wrecked with Dawn’s presence, but they’d eaten and had drinks, and when Jean invited him back to her place, he didn’t see the harm in it.

      As the car’s heater warms him now, he thinks backward six hours. He’d met Jean for the date at Jack’s, as he’d waited for Quinn. But even before she arrived, he was telling himself that Quinn really didn’t need him anymore. Getting Jean out on a weeknight seemed a good first effort; it made the wait feel different.

      And he thinks a few hours before that, when he’d checked his phone and had seen no one had called. Quinn didn’t have the money for a satellite phone for the boat, only an archaic ship-shore radio; he did have a cheap cell phone he could use when he got close enough to land. The first call always went to the wholesaler, to meet him with the refrigerator truck to unload; the second call was to Robbie, to give him an ETA of the bar time. No calls came, and he put it out of his mind as he followed Jean home in his car.

      He thinks of how they made love, very gently, and how as he and Jean lay together afterward, the music ran out. Jean got out of bed in the dark and opened her iPad to find something new to play. Robbie, under the sheet, watched her naked and bathed in the screen’s blue light, her breasts and collarbone and long neck as perfectly rendered against the darkness as marble under a master’s hands—exquisite and noble. Then, as quickly, he told himself that he wouldn’t allow himself to do that to another woman in his life.