She did not at once respond, and he thought that somehow he had offended her or had sounded so jejune that she was embarrassed for him, but then she said, “What quality?”

“I don’t know. I can’t get my mind around it yet. But I have this feeling that when I do, when I understand that part of you…I’ll know why you couldn’t accept my proposal.”

She regarded him with such tenderness that he could hardly bear the weight of it.

“Sam,” he pressed, “is what I feel possible? Is there something in this book that will tell me what it was I didn’t have that you needed most?”

“I suppose there could be. There is. Though I didn’t write it to enlighten you.”

“I understand.”

“But inevitably, I’m in it. All of me, down there under the luminescent plankton.”

The melancholy of her smile was a deeper sorrow than before.

He glanced around, wondering if passersby were alert to the small drama on this bench. Sam was already something of a literary celebrity, and he did not want to discomfit her by making any kind of scene.

The shoppers hurried past unaware, self-amused children giggled, young couples hand-in-hand drifted by in mutual infatuation, and only an Irish setter on a leash looked alertly at Ryan and Sam as though catching the scent of distress, but it was pulled along by a man in khaki shorts and Birkenstocks.

“Sam, you know, I wish you’d just tell me what it was I didn’t have.”

“During all the time we were together, I tried to tell you.”

He frowned. “Was I that dense?”

With the gentlest regret, she said, “It’s not a thing you discuss like halitosis or table manners, Ryan. It’s not a thing you can acquire overnight just because you know I need it. And the worst would be to fake it because you think it’s wanted.”

“So how was I supposed to know what it was, what you needed-by subtext?”

“Yes. By subtext. The implicit meaning of how I lived my life, what I felt, what mattered to me.”

“Sam, I’m lost.”

Revealing a pain at which her melancholy had only hinted, she said, “Sweetie, I know. I know you are, I know, and it breaks my heart.”

He risked reaching out to her, and she took his hand, for which his gratitude was too great to be expressed.

“Sam, if I read the book enough to get it, to understand what you needed that I didn’t have, and if I can be that for you, whatever it is, can we try again?”

She gripped his hand tightly, as though she wanted to hold fast to him forever. Nevertheless, she said, “It’s too late, Ryan. I wish it weren’t, but it is.”

“Is there…someone else?”

“No. There hasn’t been, not a single date this whole year, and I’ve been fine alone, I didn’t want anything else. Maybe one day there will be someone. I don’t know.”

“But you loved me. I know you did. You can’t just stop loving someone from one day to the next.”

“I never stopped,” she said.

Those three words, with such potential to exhilarate him, instead disheartened because her voice conveyed with them a quiet yet intense grief, an anguish, with which wives spoke of their recently deceased husbands, for whom their love would henceforth be unrequited.

“I love you,” she said. “But I can’t be in love with you.”

Frustrated, he said, “You’re parsing words.”

“I’m not. There’s a difference.”

“Not enough to matter.”

“Everything matters, Ryan. Everything.”

“Please tell me what I’ve done.”

She looked stricken. “No. Oh, God, no.”

Her reaction seemed out of proportion to his question, which after all was just another way of asking what she needed that he had not recognized.

The sharp emotion of her response implied that they were at the hard point on which the lever of their relationship was balanced, the point on which it had turned from light to dark, from hope to hopelessness.

Designing software, running a business, you learned to recognize lever-point moments, to bear down on them and by bearing down to lift the whole enterprise over an impediment and swing it toward success.

“Please tell me,” Ryan pressed. “Tell me what I’ve done.”

Her hand tightened on his so fiercely that her grip hurt him and her fingernails gouged almost to the point of drawing blood.

“Love you and yet talk about it? Face to face? Impossible.”

“But if you love me, you want to get past this as much as I do.”

“There is no getting past it.”

“We will get past it,” he insisted.

“I don’t want to destroy everything.”

“Destroy what? What’s left if we don’t try?”

“The year we had together when so much was right.”

“That can’t be destroyed, Sam.”

“Oh, yes, it can. By talking about this.”

“But if we just-”

“And nothing to be gained now. Nothing to be set right by words. Nothing to be prevented.”

He opened his mouth to speak.

She stopped him before his inhalation escaped him as another breath of pleading words. “No. Let me keep loving you. And let me remember the time when I was in love with you, let me have that forever.”

Because Ryan was so abashed at the purity of her passion, at the realization that she had loved him more entirely than he perhaps had the capacity to understand, and because still he did not know what need he had failed to fill, what mistake he had made, he could reply with only two words.

Once more, she stopped him before he could speak. “Don’t say you’re lost. Don’t say it again.” Her eyes were lustrous with grief and her voice tremulous. “It’s true. I accept it’s true, and that’s why I can’t bear to hear it again. I just can’t, Winky.”

She pulled her hand from his, not angrily but with a quiet desperation, got to her feet, hesitated as if she might change her mind and sit again, but then turned and walked away.

For fear of chasing after her, Ryan remained on the bench, in the glassy sunshine, the red ivy geraniums as colorful as a Tiffany lampshade, the shop windows a blur of glare, the arcs of water in a fountain shimmering like Steuben and splashing into the receiving pool with a bright, brittle, shattering sound.

Eventually he noticed the young Asian woman standing twenty feet away, in front of the bookstore. She appeared to be watching him, and must have seen him with Samantha.

She held in both hands perhaps half a dozen stems of pale-pink lilies rising from a cone of florist-shop cellophane tied with a blue ribbon.

Concerned that she might be an admirer of Samantha’s book and, intrigued by his tête-à-tête with the author, might approach him to discuss the novel, Ryan rose from the bench. He could only tell this woman that he was lost, and she, too, would be unable to help him.

The winters of the past half decade had been among the chilliest on record for California, though temperatures that made a local reach for a sweater might seem like picnic weather to anyone in Maine or Michigan. With two hours of unseasonably balmy daylight remaining, Saturday crowds strolled the sprawling open-air mall, more to bask in the sun and to people-watch than to shop.

At one time, these multitudes would have energized Ryan, and he would have found the scene engaging. Now they made him edgy.

Recuperation from transplant surgery had required a period of calm and quiet. Thereafter, he avoided crowds, out of concern his immunosuppressant drugs would make him vulnerable to colds and flu that might be hard to shake. Eventually he spent more time at home not because of medical necessity but because he had come for the time being to prefer solitary pursuits.

This throng did not push or jostle, but wandered the mall maze at a relaxed pace. Yet these people seemed like crushing legions, a buzzing swarm, an alien species that would sweep him along to some inescapable hive. As he made his way toward the parking lot, he resisted a plein-air claustrophobia that, had he surrendered to it, would have sent him running pell-mell for open space.