Deaths Excellent Vacation

something else. She had said she did, but he had always wondered, and wondered even still.
    “Honestly, it’s sort of a sad story for such a beautiful morning,” he said. “What about you?”
    She cocked her head curiously, maybe intrigued by the tragic air about him. Tim had seen it before. Maybe someday he would take advantage of the way some women reacted to sad stories, but he had not yet reached a place where he could do that.
    “Just sightseeing. A little California dreaming, you know? Started in Napa and made my way down with . . . Well, Kirk’s no longer with me.”
    So his name had been Kirk.
    “Kirk?”
    She arched her eyebrow suggestively. “I guess I was a little too much for him.”
    Tim could have taken that any number of ways, but the eyebrow made it clear what she meant. In his mind he could practically hear Kirk’s voice even now, calling her every filthy thing he could think of. When he had imagined the woman on the receiving end of those words, she had been nothing like this lovely creature on the balcony. As beautiful as she was, she seemed sweet, even charming.
    “I’m sorry to hear that,” Tim said.
    “It’s a morning for sad stories, I guess,” she said. “My name is Diana, by the way.”
    “Tim,” he said.
    “Sorry if we kept you up last night, Tim.”
    He grinned, feeling himself flush even more deeply, and glanced away. If he had seen the comment coming, he could have prepared, pretended to have slept through it all, but her directness had sneaked up on him.
    “Nah, it’s fine. I mean, not for long—”
    Diana pouted. “I think I might be insulted.”
    “—no, no, that came out wrong,” he stammered. Then he laughed at his own embarrassment. “I’m a pretty sound sleeper. And who hasn’t been on the other side of thin walls at least once, right?”
    Her eyes seemed to dance with merriment. “Exactly. That’s so true.”
    She sat up to take a sip of her coffee, her breasts straining against the thin fabric of her bikini top, a single strand of her blond hair—loose from the ponytail—hanging across her face.
    “So, are you going to tell me why you’re in Santa Monica?”
    Her boldness impressed and entranced him. As he thought about it, he could see this woman being the honest, passionate, carnal lover whose voice he had heard through the wall the night before. Yet Diana had many facets, and he saw one of them now, as a kind of sorrow filled her eyes.
    “I don’t mind sad stories. I’ve got a whole catalog of them myself. Go ahead. I’m a big girl. I can take it.”
    Something in that last line made him wonder if she had said it to tease him, but he might have imagined it, added a pouty, sexy insouciance to it that was really only an echo of the night before.
    “You might think it’s a little strange,” he ventured.
    Diana turned her chair slightly, basking in the sun even as she transformed their two balconies into a strangely intimate confessional.
    “I like strange.”
    Tim thought about Kirk, the idiot who had apparently left this woman after a night like they’d shared last night. What kind of fool must he be?
    “All right,” Tim said. He turned down the page in his book and laid it across his chest, staring out at the ocean for a moment before returning his focus to Diana’s curious gaze. “I’m on a kind of tour, I guess. I’ve been to New Orleans and Montreal and to Martha’s Vineyard, off Cape Cod. I even went down to this little village on the Gulf of Mexico. They’re all places that were important to my wife, Jenny, and me during the years we had together.”
    The kindness in Diana’s eyes broke his heart all over again. “She’s gone?”
    “Just over a year ago. Pancreatic cancer. It was agony for her, so it was probably good that she went quickly, but I didn’t have time, you know? No time to get used to the idea of life without her. It’s taken me this long to accept that I’ve got to live my life. I know she’d have wanted that for me. I’m only thirty-seven. There are a lot of days ahead, if I’m lucky. So I’m on vacation, but it’s also kind of our farewell tour.”
    “Wow,” Diana whispered, almost wistful. “That may be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard. You’re, like, the perfect husband.”
    A familiar guilt filled him. It had grown like rust on his heart over the years. After he had betrayed Jenny, he had spent every day trying to make it up to her. He doubted he would ever have been able to,