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This woman did not exist.
    And now I was very far from shore.
    Too far, and my thoughts were becoming disconnected. She was a source of light. She beckoned me, a pale figure, and I swam until my sinews burned. My vision grew spotty. There, I told myself. This proves it. You are having hallucinations. It’s the sort of thing that happens to people when they freeze to death. You are leaving the real world, and as you depart you create one of your own.
    Must save her, must not let her drown.
    My hand struck something, and then I felt a hand close around mine. Close, and hang on.
    I woke on the sand, my face buried in the wet stuff so that I spluttered and nearly choked as I inhaled sharply. I dragged myself to my feet.
    WARNING , the sign announced. NO SWIMMING. SURF EXTREMELY DANGEROUS .
    She was nowhere. I could not breathe. I tried to call out but I had no voice. I could feel her grip in my numb hands as though she still held my fingers.
    No , I breathed. It isn’t possible .
    My security man, Fern Samuels, poured more hot coffee from the thermos. I was enrobed, fortified, by layers of terrycloth and goose down. Fern did not say what he must have been thinking. He watched me drink hot coffee and then turned to see what I was seeing, the figures of policemen at the edge of the surf in what had become drizzle. There were flashlights, beams cutting into the mist, waves glittering.
    â€œThey’re not finding anything,” said Fern. He was tall and wide, a former Secret Service man, a man who took things in with a glance.
    â€œThere was someone there,” I said. I did not let him hear my teeth chattering.
    â€œThen she’s gone,” he said. He meant: drowned.
    Fern let me give him a long look.
    He did not comment that my pastime was a foolish one. Fern understood danger. He understood the frustrations I had suffered in recent years, and I knew that Fern was a man who had taken his own frustrations into the firing range, or the gym, and exorcised them. He had worked for my father, and he understood me, and my family.
    I had called him from my car, by instinct reaching out to the security of a familiar voice right after I called 911.
    Now, when the police spoke to us, they consulted with Fern. Their attitude toward me was respectful, deferential, and they were happy to have Fern as a go-between. They nodded, muttering with him in the mist, while I tried to hide my shivering.
    Fern stepped toward me across the sand, a few grains of it glittering on the black shine of his shoe. “No sign of her,” he said.
    Perhaps Fern was waiting for me to describe the woman’s appearance. Perhaps he was waiting for me to say that I would never swim here again. There had always been an unspoken attitude: You hire me to protect you, and then you routinely nearly drown—for fun. I met his eyes and gave a shake to my head.
    He sighed. “We have to go, Stratton. A body can wash up miles from here.”
    â€œI’ll stay until they find her.”
    He let his voice fall to a world-weary pitch. “I know how you feel. I don’t blame you. But it’s pointless.”
    My voice was hoarse. “I should have done something different.”
    He waved aside my words. He had seen men die.
    â€œI came so close to saving her,” I said.
    By now I was once again thinking that she had been a hallucination, a trick of the cold, the wind. What else could it have been? I was sure—and yet I was not sure.
    â€œMaybe,” I breathed, afraid to say what I was thinking. “Maybe she wasn’t there at all. Maybe she wasn’t real.”
    Fern put his hand on my shoulder. His grip was firm, well defined through my layers of cotton and goose down. “This is a dangerous place,” he said, meaning, I knew, not merely this San Francisco shoreline, but the ocean, the world.
    Only at the last did I see it, a luminous slip in the glistening sand. It glowed, as the figure had, and I knelt.