It was the first time Hardy’d had a woman’s arms around him in four and a half years. And that time had been just the once, with Frannie née McGuire now Cochran, after a New Year’s Eve party.

The pilot was explaining they’d dropped three thousand feet, something about wind shears and backwashes of 747s. Hardy loosened the woman’s hold on him. “You’re all right,” he said gently. “We’re all okay.” He looked around the plane, at the ashen faces, the grotesque smiles, the tears. His own reaction, he figured, would come a little later.

In fifteen minutes they were at the gate in San Francisco. Hardy cleared customs, speaking to no one, and went to the Tiki Bar, where he ordered a black and tan-ideally a mixture of Guinness Stout and Bass Ale. This one wasn’t ideal.

Halfway through the first one, he felt his legs go, and he grinned at himself in the bar’s mirror. Next his hands started shaking and he put them on his lap, waiting for the reaction to pass. Okay, it was safe. He was on the ground and could think about it now.

In a way, he thought, it was too bad the plane hadn’t crashed. There would have been some symmetry in that-both of his parents had died in a plane crash when he’d been nineteen, a sophomore at Cal Tech.

A crash would also have been timely. Since Baja hadn’t helped him to figure his life out, nor had two weeks on the wagon, maybe there was simply no solution. If the plane had gone down, he wouldn’t have had to worry about it anymore.

He’d spent his days under water in the reefs where the Sea of Cortez meets the Pacific. He had held the shell of a sea tortoise and ridden it for perhaps two hundred yards. He’d gone over the side of the panga into a school, a city, a landscape of leaping dolphins while his guide tried to tell him they would kill him. Well, if that was the way he was going to go, he couldn’t have thought of a better one.