It was a hazy late November day, a little less than two hours before The Big Game, the historic end of the season football rivalry begun in 1892 between the University of California at Berkeley Golden Bears and the Stanford University Cardinal.

Sitting by herself, eating pate, Saint-André cheese, French bread warm from the oven, and sweet butter, sipping slowly from a glass of rosé wine, Caydance recollected sitting in the same deli, seven or eight years ago, planning her future. On the day she was remembering, she had decided to apply to the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for graduate work in art history.

The deli where she sat on this autumn day was not a place where she envisioned Griff sitting with her. Although sometimes he surprised her with a desire for food that reminded him of lunch with his French Canadian mother, he preferred to take out French food and eat it in the privacy of Caydance’s studio. Perhaps, she imagined, he was avoiding a local gossip column headline: "Former Oakland Raider Griff McGuire seen in Berkeley, eating French pate and cheese and drinking rosé.