“I have complete faith in you.”

“We’ve got a client whose blood was found at the scene of a murder. Alex Zhukovsky is hanging tough with his story. We don’t know why anybody would want to kill Christina or want the old man’s bones. We don’t even have a decent theory. We don’t have anything,” Nina said shortly. She wanted to stop into a souvenir shop to buy herself a chambered nautilus displayed in the window. They tested the door. The store was closed.

“We will,” Paul promised. They caught up with Bob, who shooed them away, having run into some kids he knew from school. From a discreet distance, listening to the sea lions making their evening ruckus for a minute, they searched the calm waters to see if they could spot an otter. Paul said to Nina, “Hey, you didn’t mention Susan would be testifying today.”

She couldn’t decide if he was studiously casual, or just casual. “True.”

“Do you think she makes a good witness?”

“Oh, yeah. Just great. Her and her big fat lips.”

He laughed. “She’s not that bad looking,” he said.

“Not surprising you’d feel that way.”

He caught her face between his hands and held on gently. “What is it?”

She shook him off. “I don’t expect to like prosecution witnesses.”

“But her testifying against Wyatt isn’t what you hold against her,” he said, “is it? You’re jealous.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“No need, you know. The minute I decided to get back with you, we broke it off.”

“Did she drop you or did you drop her?”

He wrinkled his nose and sighed. “What’s the difference?”

“It matters,” she said stubbornly, arms crossed, unable to say why it should matter.

“I broke it off.”

“Liar.”

“Nina, this isn’t like you.”

“Yeah, it’s me. It’s me, in trial. I’m sorry.”

He pulled her to him, trying to make up, she could tell, but she couldn’t. She moved away. She felt his eyes on her as she leaned out over the railing toward the water.

A small cruise boat docked farther down, and they watched the rowdy partygoers unload.

“C’mon, let’s clear the air,” Paul said. “Nina, I’m over forty. I’ve had past relationships. You knew that. I’ve had two wives, for Chrissake. And I slept with them. I’ll bet you slept with your husbands, too, and there’s no question about Kurt, either, now that I mention it, given the fact of Bob’s existence!”

He had slept with Susan. She had known it, but the blood pounding in her head told her she had held a vain hope that he hadn’t.

“You don’t want to dredge up this old stuff,” he went on, so reasonable.

The old stuff, as he put it, was already dredged and heaped up high, obscuring her rationality.

“’Cause, just for example, you’d hate me reminding you about that kid you used to go skinny-dipping with, right? I mean, I didn’t know you then or anything, so I have no reason whatsoever to picture you and him swimming on a warm evening out there with the bullfrogs and stars. You buck naked. With him.”

Surprised that he was nursing a long-ago, minor mention of herself as a teenager hanging around the rocky pools in Carmel Valley with that wild-kid boyfriend of hers, she couldn’t think of anything to say.

“Your clothes tossed behind on the hillside, a little pot in the air. Your hair wet, drifting all over the place. A bright moon. Him some prime example of young manhood. Shit, Nina.” He frowned.

She couldn’t help herself. She started to laugh. “Yeah, it was just like that, only you left out the poison oak I got, and the tick he got, and the shouting argument part.”

“Just tell me his name,” Paul said, responding to her, now on a roll and just teasing. “So if I run into him minding his own business one fine day, I know who to pound senseless.”

Pelicans flew overhead and the black water lapped against the pilings and the shopkeepers turned out lights in the stores on each side of the pier. She kissed him. Gathering Bob up, they bought saltwater taffy and chewed on it as they walked back toward Alvarado downtown, past laughter and the smell of coffee and grease coming from the crowded fish joints.

Bob skulked along behind them, kicking anything loose he could find on the pavement. “Being back at the old firm getting to you?” Paul asked Nina.

“It’s like coming home after going to college or somewhere. There’s a big brother, Bear, who protects Daddy’s image, and a new puppy, Sean, who nips. The dynamics are familiar and sometimes hard. I know they mostly support me. That’s the good part.”

“The bad part?”

“Progress doesn’t usually involve coming home to roost. It’s the kind of thing you do after a colossal failure. Now that I’m living here and working here again, I can’t help feeling that I’m like a scared person running home. Like I can’t cut it on my own somewhere else. Talk of a partnership just makes me nervous.”

“A partnership?”

“Bear approached me about it.”

“That would be good.”

She twisted the ring, which seemed so tight tonight. “That would make Tahoe an impossibility, all right.”

He picked at a splinter he had gotten leaning on the railing. “I like having you close.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t watch-I mean worry about me so much.”

“Why shouldn’t I try to protect you? You get in the most god-awful messes.”

“I can handle my own messes.”

“No, you can’t.” He said this with brutal conviction.

Nina raised her voice. “You’re so damn protective, Paul. How long will it be before you try to get me to stop practicing criminal law?”

He unwound his arm from around her waist. “Stop it,” he said. “Susan and I are not seeing each other. All right? Get that through your noggin.”

“Let’s forget it,” she said, and she should have apologized again, but she was too angry about too many things and all of them were not about Paul. The best she could do was take his arm.

“What’s next?” Paul asked, keeping his voice low with an effort Nina appreciated.

“Sandy set up appointments for you with Alex Zhukovsky; Stefan’s girlfriend, Erin; his mother, Wanda; and his brother, Gabe. They’ll all be on the stand in the next few days. She faxed you a list of my special concerns about what they might say. And you’ll probably want to talk to Klaus’s investigator.”

“I meant what’s next for tonight.”

“Oh. We find your car and call it a night.”

He nuzzled her hair. “Bob could stay with his grandpa again. He likes staying there.”

“Not tonight.”

“We need to be together. I’ve barely seen you, and I’ve slept with you exactly twice in the past two weeks.”

“Don’t get mad, Paul.”

“I hate sleeping alone. I want you tonight.” He pressed against her and she almost changed her mind. But she didn’t.

“Soon, I promise.”

Saturday morning, before driving Bob to the train, Nina stopped in to see Sandy at the office. She proofed and signed each paper Sandy shoveled toward her for the next half hour.

“When does Bob go?” Sandy asked.

Nina consulted the clock on the wall. Like everything else at the Pohlmann firm, it had a distinguished but dusty venerability. Outside, a few renegade wildflowers still waved between the weed sprouts of late summer. “His train’s at around ten-thirty from San Jose. I wish I could go with him. I could check up on your daughter.”

“No need,” Sandy said. “We know what’s happening. She calls Joseph every night.”

How nice that Sandy’s daughter liked talking to her father. Nina imagined Joe in the kitchen of their borrowed house at Big Sur, drinking a beer, maybe looking out at the pasture full of horses, the phone to his ear, emanating warm, loving vibes for his troubled daughter. That was the way it was supposed to be with fathers and daughters.

She couldn’t remember it ever being that way with her and her father, Harlan. Her mother provided the shoulder while her father straggled behind her, a backdrop to her vitality. He beautifully provided all the practical things-the house, the cars, the bacon-while keeping his distance from her and Matt. Maybe his heart was squeezed tight already by their mother. At the end, when their mother was so sick and he had spent so much time nursing her, when was there time for two needy kids? Especially if you considered his girlfriend, Angie, must have been occupying him, too…