As I watch the world passing by outside, I think about the last seven days. Slowly but surely, I’ve managed to enclose the memory of that night with Daniel in mental scar tissue, partitioned off from the rest of me like the shrapnel in Cain’s body. Now and then, the pain of the guilt returns, but it’s never as sharp as the last time and eventually it will blunt to a dull ache I can live with. There is just one bridge left to cross. My ring and my necklace. What if that man, Daniel, has them? The ring belonged to Cain’s mother – it’s one of a kind. I check the rattling trailer in the rear-view mirror, then scan the scene through the window.

‘Every view is a postcard,’ my grandpa used to say of this country. Beneath an unblemished sky, it’s all rich New Zealand green fields and name-on-a-map towns. Each with a corner pub, a bakery and a cafe. Some towns have gimmicks – sheets of corrugated iron bent and bolted to form gumboots or farm animals, a fence of jandals, or murals painted on every wall. This nation has always been obsessed with character and without something to distinguish it, a town out here might simply cease to exist. Every view is a postcard, and Grandpa chose one of the best views to set up his life. The picture-perfect isolation of Lake Tarawera.

After a couple of hours driving, we begin to see the steam of Rotorua. It crawls out of drains and sweeps across the roads. It rises up out of the muddy pits of Kuirau park. Rotorua’s appeal can’t be simply replicated with a few sheets of iron or by tethering jandals, bras, hats or beer bottles to an otherwise naked fence. It’s geothermal. It’s volcanic. The tourists say the smell is rotten eggs, but to me it’s richer than that, earthy with an ammoniac sting. Cain steers us the long way around Lake Rotorua out near where he grew up as a kid. The sun is high, and the lake is flat, jewelled with sunlight. I spy that knuckle of land, Mokoia Island, at the centre of the lake as Cain slows down to pass over a narrow bridge where a river feeds the lake. Boys are lined up in the sun, looking down at the water, their brown skin glistening.

Cain indicates, pulls over into the gravel at the road’s edge.

‘What’s up?’

‘Quick dip,’ he says, reaching for his towel on the back seat.

He peels his t-shirt off, places his hei matau, an intricate fishhook of Pounamu greenstone he wears around his neck, on the dashboard and climbs out of the car. He starts back towards the bridge, leaving his towel on the boot. I move my thumb to roll my wedding ring around my finger and remember it’s missing.