He has a knife. It is why he came to work with her. His purpose is its purpose.

He has a knife. Sometimes he imagines having another use for it. He imagines taking her somewhere, far from the demands around them both - an island, lush with flowers and fruit hanging from trees, with clams under the sand, and fish in tidal pools. Scarlet purple sunsets wash away the days, as pink gold sunrises drink away the nights.

He has his knife here. She uses it to cut her clothing - sometimes just to adjust for the everlasting heat, sometimes for other uses - to tide them over until they master the art of making rope from native plant fibers or to use as bandages.

On the island, he has all of her attention. As her cares drop away from her, he sees her smile more and more. Her freedom from worry becomes his freedom. The knife helps them.

He never permits himself the luxury of daydreaming that he is with his family. He would never come out again if he allowed himself to go into that dream.

But sometimes, weary from the endless nightmares of his life's purpose and the endless puzzles his work presents him, he allows himself this little vacation from ugly reality. He builds the details of how they survive together on this island with his knife. She is clever and practical even though she is a city girl - she will easily learn what he knows about living rough, and will figure out ways to make things easier.

He takes her there, because it is safe. She is safe from what his knife might do to someone else, and safe from what another knife might do to her. He is safe from his ghosts, and she is safe from letting her soul drain away with the demands of her work.

No need to imagine seducing her. He simply knows they come together in the chill after sundown, as naturally and effortlessly as stretching after a nap.

He sometimes imagines her bare belly round with his child. He thinks no further than that. She is too slender to risk giving birth away from modern medical care - and conjuring up a larger island with a hospital near enough to sail a little boat to would add no pleasure to the fantasy. He has no real desire to have another child and does not choose to contemplate the details of raising hers on his island. But he likes the feel in his mind of lying beside her in the warm sand, arm around her, the baby kicking against his hand. He sometimes imagines finding a time machine to go back before he destroyed his family, before he got tangled up in his wife. He would undo it all, and have only her on this island. And when she was five or six months gone, he would stop time. They would live like that forever - safe from his grief, his arrogance, his foolishness.

He is not fool enough to think that what he feels here on the island is the same as he had before, but he thinks over time she would feel it is similar. The discrepancy almost tastes like dust and ashes.

He dares not yield himself up to this daydream on the couch in her office, nor yet anywhere else in that building. It rarely comes to him in his usual motel room. It is when they have traveled and he finds himself in an unfamiliar bed that he gives in like an alcoholic giving in to the solace of just one last drink.

He has a knife and a purpose and sometimes he wishes for a different life.