“Paranoia?”

“You’re good. But let’s hope not.”

“Hmmm. Give me a minute.”

“I’ve got court at ten. I’ve got to get going.”

“I’ve got it,” she announced as Nina put her hand on the doorknob. “Paramour. She takes a lover and shows him what he’s missing.”

“Well, not exactly what I had in mind, but that’s a possibility.”

The pebbles flashed with light. “Not palimony.”

“Bingo.”

“But the plaintiffs never win those cases, do they?” said Sandy. “Speaking strictly about money, which we don’t do often enough, you’re on the wrong side.”

“Yes, that’s true.”

“Who’s the lucky guy representing Mike Markov?”

“The lucky guy would be Jeffrey Riesner.”

Sandy made a sound low in her throat. Her eyes narrowed to a squint.

While she grappled with this latest abominable turn of events, Nina escaped out the door.

That afternoon, Nina hit first the on-line computer resources, and then emptied her pockets of change at the copy machine, collecting everything she could find in a cursory overview at the law library.

Palimony. The word had been coined in the seventies when Michelle Triola sued the movie actor Lee Marvin for a share of his earnings after a relationship without the benefit of marriage. Unfortunately for Ms. Triola, although the jury awarded her some money for “rehabilitation,” an appeals court had thrown the decision out. She got nothing, but Marvin v. Marvin had put the concept onto the legal map, and that was almost as good as setting a precedent.

Nina skimmed the cases she already knew and a few she didn’t. Liberace’s estate had been sued by his lover, a young fellow who felt stiffed, so to speak. It was hard to take some of the cases seriously. There was a border area of frivolous cases in which aggrieved lovers simply felt entitled to something after their partners died or moved on. The cases were full of the ingredients the press loves the most: romance and fame.

And, considering the pot of money involved, how they would love this one.

For some time she lost herself in the suit filed by Kelly Fisher, the model who had been Dodi Fayed’s lover before Princess Diana, and who had actually been able to sue for breach of promise in a French court. As Nina had told Lindy, there would be no such luck in hard-nosed California. There had to be some kind of contract to share income and assets, and the contract had to be provable. At least, that was how the issues had been decided in the past.

As she sat at the library conference table straining her eyes on the fine print of opinions, she thought to herself that she had never seen the word “love” in any of the thousands of pages of California laws. “What’s love got to do with it,” she hummed to herself as she read.

Love was yin, traditionally the province of women, female, subjective. Law was yang, male, objective. She felt uncomfortable about Lindy’s position. Show me the hard evidence, the lawyer in her said. Promises of marriage, sex, talk of love, midlife crises, affairs-the legal system had washed its hands of these. She didn’t want to be associated with such sloppy emotional matters herself. A woman lawyer had to take special care to be more objective than anybody else.

Yet these matters were now inextricably intertwined with a huge amount of money, and the legal system was being used to keep the money in the hands of Mike Markov. It wasn’t right. Her anger worked on her, as it always did, seeking a productive outlet. But what could she do all by herself in a fight against these big boys?

She found herself thumbing through the Civil Code, skimming mindlessly through the sections on marriage. They wouldn’t be applicable to unmarried people, but what were Lindy and Mike if not married? Lindy was much more than a girlfriend.

Frustrated, Nina thought, we need more laws to cover this, and caught herself just in time. Her entire wall was covered with the Annotated Codes of the State of California, with so many new ones passed each year that no one could keep up.

All right, make an old law fit, she thought. She went through the statutes again. This time her eye caught on a humble little statute that would probably be repealed as obsolete the first time some modern lawmaker noticed it: Civil Code section 1590 said, Where either party to a contemplated marriage in this State makes a gift of property to the other on the basis or assumption that the marriage will take place, in the event that the donee refuses to enter into the marriage… the donor may recover such gift…

Nina repeated that to herself. She thought of dowries, of handsome men in high collars, of jilted fiancés.

Suppose Paul gave me a wildly expensive diamond engagement ring, she thought, but I refused to marry him after all. The ring would have to go back, or at least, the jury could give it back to him if he took me to court.

Say she gave him something. I will give you my fortune if you marry me, she said to herself, trying to paraphrase the code into words she easily understood. She still didn’t quite get it. She tried again. I promise you something, and in return you marry, or promise to marry, me. Yes. That’s what the code said in plain language.

She thought again about her interview with Lindy, about what Lindy had said.

Looking down at her legal pad, which had more doodles than notes, she saw that she had drawn a pair of wedding bells with a ribbon on top. Musical notes made a circle around them.

Certainly bells had begun to ring in her brain.

She planted a big kiss on the homely phrase before copying it down.

At five o’clock she slammed closed her last book of the day, then drove to her brother Matt’s to pick up her son. Matt and his wife, Andrea, lived with their two children in a neighborhood known as Tahoe Paradise, only a few blocks from where Nina and her son now lived. Matt ran a parasailing business in the summer and a tow truck business in the winter. Andrea worked at the local women’s shelter, a way station through which a steady and burgeoning stream of battered women and their kids flowed.

Tucked into a clearing in the woods in a small wooden house with a stone fireplace that smoked for most of the year, they lived the way people had lived a hundred years ago at Tahoe, the only visible nod to suburbia being the struggling lawn that was now, with all the rain they had been having, a silky-looking iridescent green patch.

She pulled the Bronco up to the house, removed her shoes, and marched across the damp grass. Might as well enjoy it. Winter was just around the corner.

Andrea opened the door before she could knock. “Nina! We expected you for lunch,” she said.

“I’m sorry. I just got busy. Is Bob still here?”

“He and Troy are up in Troy’s room working on the computer.”

Nina reached out to squeeze Andrea’s arm. “How’s everyone doing? Have they been at it since they got home from school?”

“Pretty much.”

“Did Bob do any homework?”

“I doubt it.”

“Uh-oh. It’s going to be a long night.”

“They work awfully hard. He needed to do something besides the usual grind.”

“I wish he’d gone outside to play. It’s so beautiful this time of year,” Nina said, breathing in the pine air, feeling the kiss of a breeze.

“Like mother, like son,” said Andrea, leading her into the house. “Put ’em in a dark room with a computer and they’re as happy as Bill Gates.”

“We’re not going to hit you up for dinner. I’ve got to get him home.” Nina went upstairs to get Bob.

Other than the difference in size, Troy and Bob looked identical from the rear in their California boy uniforms, Van’s two-toned suede sneakers, emblemed T-shirts, baggy plaid shorts, hair a modified monk style. Troy, a year younger, turned around to say hi when she came in. Bob continued to stare hypnotically at the screen in front of him.