She’d hoped for dirty rain and just a scrub of moonglow, but the visibility was poor enough to suit her, the car’s headlights diffused by misshapen ghosts of drifting sea mist, one of them twisting like a wraith in the road. Beside her, Sharkey sighed and squirmed like a small boy in a big chair, kicking to get comfortable, wishing to be elsewhere. Two weeks after his wipeout he was still too rattled to get behind the wheel. Struggling to break free of the hold-down, snatching at his leash, he’d somehow whipped his hand and sprained his wrist. He was gripping the wrist now, cuffing it with his good hand as he fidgeted, discontent obvious in his cramped unwilling posture.

“This sucks.”

But Olive did not reply. She drove downhill to the shore in silence, then along the narrow road next to the slosh of the sea.

At last she said, “Bloody right. That’s why we’re here.”

Near Waimea a pothole the size and shape of a manhole opening shone in the lights of an oncoming car, water from the morning’s rain shimmering silver in the hole.

“I hate being here.”

“Ask yourself why.” When he didn’t answer she went on. “And yet you pass this spot practically every day on your way to town or surfing.”

“I don’t stop.”

“That’s why we’re stopping.”

“I don’t even look.”

“You have to—now.”

He struggled in the seat. “I don’t want to do this.”

“Pull your finger out, mate!” she said, and gasped in frustration.

That got his attention. When he sensed the car slowing down he covered his face, but clumsily, favoring his injured wrist.

“It was right here,” she said, “on a night a little like this.”

She rolled onto the shoulder of the road, a narrow strip of sand, broken coral, and stones grinding beneath the tires. Her yank on the handbrake had a force with the sound of a demand in it, in the ratcheting a jerk-squeak of finality.

Sharkey sat in silence. After a deep breath that he expelled as a sigh he said, “I didn’t see him.”

“That was your first lie. You did see him—you said, ‘Oh God’—and then you hit him.”

Olive unclicked her safety belt and got out of the car, Sharkey following her, slowly, in reluctance. Now Olive was kneeling in the dark, the sound of waves breaking in Waimea Bay, sea-slop draining from the deep fissures in the lava rocks on the low cliffs.

“He was lying here,” she said. “I could see his neck was broken. Head trauma. He had no pulse.”

“He was drunk.”

“You were drunk,” she said, standing up to face him.

“I was buzzed.”

“Buzzed is drunk.”

“He was riding down the wrong side of the road.”

“You’re blaming him. A lot of bike riders ride that way.”

“I didn’t mean it,” Sharkey said softly.