“I checked him out,” Sharkey said in a tone of protest.

“Wait. The cop comes,” Olive said, still narrating the order of events. “You tell him that you weren’t drinking. That you were buckled up. That you didn’t see the man on the bike.”

In the distance beyond the curve of the bay a car’s headlights lifted from the surface of the road, making a tunnel of the trees. Sharkey rolled back to a squat and began to get to his feet.

“Stay where you are,” Olive said. “Is that what happened?”

“Something like that.”

“Is that a yes?”

Sharkey sighed—the small boy’s sigh, a whimper with a yes fluttering through it.

The oncoming vehicle slowed down—an old pickup truck, a surfboard slung in the back—and when it rolled to a stop the driver cranked down the window.

“You guys all right?”

“We’re fine,” Olive said.

But the man was watching Sharkey, who had dropped to his knees again.

“Sure you don’t need any help?”

Olive said, “We lost something.”

“Eh,” the driver grunted, with confidence. “Joe Sharkey—how’s it?”

Sharkey lifted his hand slowly, a tentative salute. “Like the wahine say, we wen’ lost something.”

“Some bugga cockaroach you stuffs?”

“Nah.” Sharkey touched his face, keeping his hand against it as though he didn’t want to be scrutinized. “Was maybe my fault.”

When the man had driven off and they were in darkness again, Olive said, “How many lies is that?”

“I don’t know. Couple, three.”

“Seven,” she said. “But there were more.”

Back in the car, she pulled onto the road and drove toward Hale‘iwa, then onto the bypass. The tension of visiting the scene of the accident, her intense concentration, her anxiety—all the emotion—nerved her to be efficient rather than uncertain. And Sharkey’s halfheartedness stiffened her resolve. It was like being in Emergency, hyperalert at midnight, receiving a casualty on a gurney, controlling the moment, in triage.

“Where are we going?”

Home was in the opposite direction. Olive had taken the way through the cane fields and was ascending to Helemano on the steep country road, no streetlamps, little traffic, twelve miles of darkness.

“Wahiawa,” she said. “The cop shop.”

Sharkey nodded; he seemed to accept the logic of retracing their steps, reconstructing the timeline of the accident. But he didn’t speak; he lapsed into the dullness Olive had come to see as his usual mood since killing the man, not unwilling but bleak and detached and luckless.

“When did it happen?” she asked.

He bobbed his head as though marking time. He said, “I honestly don’t know.”

“Think,” she insisted.

She could hear a slow growl of frustration. Sharkey didn’t speak, only made an audible gripe, but it was a grunt of futility, not as distinct as a word.

“Over a month,” she said. “It’ll be five weeks on Thursday.”