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NORMA BANKS AND I finish our work by noon. We spend the morning talking more about the dream jury she’d like me to seat, the kind of technology and research she plans for the “whippersnappers” she has working for her, and she reminds me all over again that she doesn’t come cheap.

“I’m not in this for the love of the game,” she says but then, with the twinkle back in the eyes, adds, “Well, maybe a little bit.”

While we’re sitting in my car waiting for the Amagansett train to arrive, she says, “I’ve only been around you for a day, and even I can see you need to take better care of yourself.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“But one tough mother,” she says.

Just like that, another Aerosmith line pops into my head.

“Nine lives,” I sing, “feelin’ lucky.”

“Pretty sure you’ve gone blowing past nine by now,” Norma says.

“But who’s counting?” I ask.

She asks when we can next get together. I vaguely tell her in a few days, that I have to go out of town.

“You do know how soon jury selection starts, right?”

“I most certainly do.”

“Am I allowed to ask where you’re going?”

“No,” I say.

She shakes her head. “The tough mother here is you, Hummingbird,” she says.

Before she went to bed last night, I told her about my mother’s love of hummingbirds, her nickname for me, one Norma has already adopted as her own.

We hear the train then. She gets out of the car. But before she walks up the steps to the platform, she leans through my open window and kisses me on the cheek.

“You take care,” she says. “I mean it.”

“See there,” I say. “You do have a soft side.”

“Don’t let it get around,” she says.

I am telling Dr. Ben Kalinsky all about Norma Banks as we take an early evening walk with Rip.

In this magic time between day and night, the sun has just set over Indian Wells Beach.

There’s hardly any wind tonight, just the sound of the waves, the whole scene convincing me all over again, not that I need much convincing, that our beaches are the most beautiful in the world.

And this one beach, the closest to my house, is my favorite of all of them, making me want to live forever and not just for a few more months.

Live happily ever after with this man, and this dog, and in this place.

I know I ought to be exhausted after what was another bad and restless night. But now I am almost hyper, doing even more talking than I usually do in the company of Ben Kalinsky.

“Funny story, by the way,” I say as my lead-in on the trip to the emergency room yesterday, something I hadn’t shared with him until right now.

“Yeah,” he says when I finish. “I mean, who doesn’t think a fainting spell isn’t a laugh riot?”

Then he adds, “You wait a whole day to tell me about this?”

“I didn’t want to worry you.”

“It’s a little late in the movie for that,” he says.

I switch the subject back to Norma, and what an absolute pisser she is, how much I believe she’s going to help me at trial.

“I’m telling you,” I say. “This old broad is totally rizzed up.”

“Rizzed up?”

“Means she has charisma, old-timer.”

“And just where did you learn that expression?”

“Netflix, of course,” I say.

We keep walking. Rip runs up ahead, occasionally chasing sandpipers, then comes racing back to us.

I tell Ben about Rob Jacobson managing to take a day trip to the city without being violated, and how not knowing whether he might have murdered six people was still keeping me up nights, whether I was about to earn him another acquittal or not.

“And that’s not even the worst part,” I say. “Would you like to know what the worst part is?”

“Shush,” he says.

I stop. He stops. Rip goes bounding back down the beach, through the waves, chasing more sandpipers across an open stretch of sand that the water hasn’t quite reached.

“What did you just say?”

“I told you to shush,” Dr. Ben says. “As in stop talking. As in zip it.”

He is smiling at me. That smile worked for him the first time I met him and is still working just fine for him tonight.

“No one has ever shushed me,” I say, “at least not as an adult-type person.”

“Had to happen eventually,” he says. “Somewhat like this.”

Then he is suddenly kneeling in the sand and out of nowhere the last of the sun is reflecting off the diamond ring inside the blue velvet box he’s just opened.

I don’t shush him.

“You’re the one with the words, so I’ll keep this simple,” Ben says. “Jane Smith, will you please effing marry me?”