“Parker,” Lucy says suddenly, “do you think it was right for you to give it up?”

She knows she has broken some tacit code in asking this. Parker is silent. He opens his mouth to speak, but doesn’t. “I don’t know,” he finally says.

Lucy wants to press the point, but is afraid of pushing him too far. She waits, almost holding her breath, the way one does in the presence of a squirrel or a bird that will scramble away at the slightest jolt.

“I loved history,” he says. “It was exciting.”

As the maître d’ leads the young couple to their table, the blond woman pauses at the grill and looks at the fish. Timidly she reaches out to press the shining scales of one.

“The funny part is,” Parker says, “somehow I made a choice. I don’t even know when. Only after it was made, I noticed that I just—”

“Thought differently?”

“Yes! That’s right!” He seems elated that she understands. “That’s what it was, I thought differently. But what bothers me …

The man and woman sit down and hold hands. The blond hair falls in a curtain down the woman’s back.

“What bothers me is …” He can’t seem to finish. One hand waves halfheartedly, trying to conjure the sentence.

“Money?” Lucy says very gently. “That somehow it was the money?”

Parker drops his hand. They look at one another in silence.