He ordered a white Italian wine with the first course, which was grilled flying fish with brittle orange caviar globules on the side. “I got to confess,” he said, grinning again, “Jeffrey Thompkins is not really my name. It’s Taormina, Joey Taormina. But that’s hard to pronounce out where I live, so I changed it.”

“I did wonder. You look… it is Neapolitan?”

“Worse. Sicilian. Anybody you meet named Taormina, his family’s originally from Sicily. Taormina’s a city on the east coast of Sicily. Gorgeous place. I’d love to show you around it some day.”

He was moving a little too fast, she thought. A lot too fast.

“I have a confession too,” she said. “I’m not from Clifton any more. I moved back into the city a month ago after my marriage broke up.”

“That’s a damn shame.” He might almost have meant it. “I’m divorced too. It practically killed my mother when I broke the news. Well, you get married too young, you get surprised later on.” A quick grin; he wasn’t all that saddened by what he had learned about her. “How about some red wine with the main course? They got a good Brunello here.”

A little later he invited her, with surprising subtlety, to spend the night with him. As gently as she could, she declined. “Well, tomorrow’s another day,” he said cheerfully. Denise found herself wishing he had looked a little wounded, just a little.

The daytime routine was simple. Sleep late, breakfast on the cottage porch looking out at the sea, then a long ambling walk down the beach, poking in tide pools and watching ghostly gray crabs scutter over the pink sand. Midmorning, swim out to the reef with snorkel and fins, drift around for half an hour or so staring at the strangely contorted coral heads and the incredibly beautiful reef creatures.