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have something to tell you.” Bick ford paused. “I’ve had a new will made up —-”
    “Hey, no talk about that today .”
    “We have to. It’s important.” Bick ford turned to Adam. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, about the newspaper. I want it to go on, Adam, after I’m gone.”
    “Bick —-”
    “Let me finish. You know what I think of you and what you’ve done with the paper. Well, I know that you’d make sure it doesn’t die . What I’m saying is that I’ve decided to leave you a majority share of the newspaper.”
    Adam was so surprised he nearly drove off the road.
    “I know what you’re thinking,” Bickford went on. “What about Lilith? Well, I love my daughter, but frankly she hasn’t got a brain in her head when it comes to money. I can’t trust her with the Times . She’d milk it to death. So I’m leaving her a forty-nine percent interest and you a fifty-one percent interest.”
    “I don’t know what to say, Bick,” Adam said. “It’s truly generous. Thank you.”
    Bick ford smiled. “Well, it’s not entirely unselfish. This way you get control of the Times but it still stays in the family. You and Lilith, running things together.”
    Adam drove on, gripping the steering wheel. He hadn’t realized until then that he had been harboring a secret dream -—divorcing Lilith. Now, with stunning clarity he recognized it for the fantasy it was. As much as he often regretted his marriage he knew divorce was not workable. Lilith would never consent to it. Besides, in some ways, his marriage was liberating. It provided a convenient framework for his life, freeing him to funnel his passion into his work. Divorce was just not feasible, especially now, in light of Bickford’s bequest.
    At the country club, Adam let himself be pulled into the socializing to take his mind off his dispirited thoughts. The presence of Ian, now lying awake but quiet in the basket, lent him a special cachet with the other men. Bringing a son into the Olympic Club was an exceptional event.
    When Bick ford had proposed two years ago that Adam join the exclusive men’s club, Adam had declined. He had always thought such clubs were for old men, those somber three-piece-suited souls he saw trudging up the steps of the Pacific Union Club on Nob Hill. But after he joined he quickly grew to love the club’s masculine elegance. The mahogany-paneled rooms filled with hunting prints and the chandeliered dining room. The dark bar where deals were quietly closed over surreptitious scotch. He especially liked the swimming pool, where he would do laps to work out the day’s tensions, beneath a beautiful stained-glass dome.
    The club was the only thing that forced him to occasionally emerge from the cocoon into which he had been retreating lately.
    No, not the only thing. Now there was his son.
    Adam took the baby out of the basket, holding him tenderly for the other men to admire.
    “ A fine boy, Adam,” someone said. “A future Olympian, of course.”
    Adam smiled. “That’s why he’s here today.”
    The thirty-seventh annual Hike ’n’ Dip, at the club’s oceanside annex, was about to begin. It was a sunny unseasonably warm day, and everyone was standing outside wearing bathing suits, laughing and kidding. A dog barked and jumped with excitement. The tradition called for a sprint across the dunes to the ocean and a plunge into the water to wash away the old year and begin the new.
    The charge began and the cheering rose. Adam cupped Ian’s dark head and held the baby’s naked body tight against his chest, letting the other men race past. The baby was awake but quiet. Adam walked to the ocean and waded in up to his waist.
    All around him, the water churned with howling Olympians.
    “To the future, my son,” Adam said.
    The baby looked up at him, dark eyes wide with trust. Adam carefully dipped the baby’s feet into the water.
    Ian Thomas Bryant began to scream.
     
     
     

    CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    Adam