His first sight of Olive had been at the party long ago in the house at Rocky Point, when she’d knelt on the floor and rescued that stoner who’d overdosed, and he’d been aroused and inspired and greedy for her. So they became lovers. But their lovemaking, wild as it had been at times, mattered less than her instinct for living, her good heart and her ingenuity, her willingness to help him through this crisis. Now he could not remember when they’d last made love, and yet he knew he would drown without her. In those places, the homeless camp, the shitshow on the beach in Wai‘anae, when he was tongue-tied or freaked out by a barking dog and Olive stepped past him and asked a direct question of a stranger, he had never loved her more. She was stronger than he was, and stood by him and was patient. Only kindness mattered.

“I’d go if I could,” she said. “I’d like to meet this ex-wife and get the drift. But I’m needed at the hospital. I’m back in surgery.”

She hugged him and was surprised by how tightly he held her, how he hung on, the big helpless man burying his face against her neck. He seemed to be moaning, No.

“I think it’s a good thing you’re doing this alone.”

“I don’t want to.”

“You’ll do fine, baby.”

He loved her for saying that.

Olive dropped him at the airport, giving him a folder with his ticket and a sheet of paper with his itinerary, his hotel, the details of Max Mulgrave’s ex-wife, her address, her phone number, and then she kissed him and patted his cheek, saying, “Gotta go.”

But inside the terminal, at the check-in counter, when the baggage handler placed his duffel on the scale, he heard the ticket agent say, “I’ll need to see your ID, Mr. Sharkey,” and the man yelped, “No way!”

“Joe Sharkey,” the baggage handler said. He was an islander, Hawaiian or Samoan, with a neck tattoo, a shaved head, a jutting jaw enlarged with bulging teeth, his big body strapped in a corsetlike brace of straps and webbing. “Da Shark!”

The ticket agent peered at Sharkey’s license and then at the baggage handler.

“Where your board at, Joe?” the man said, hooking his thumbs into the straps of his brace.

“I don’t surf anymore,” Sharkey said in a subdued voice, feeling small next to the man.

“You lost some weight, brah.”

“It’s not that.”

“He da weenah!” the man shouted at the ticket agent. “Triple Crown! Monster wave. He came top in the Eddie. Dis man da Shark!”

He reached to bump fists, but Sharkey was slow to respond, and said, “Last time I surfed I nearly drowned.”

“Not true, brah.” But the man dropped his arm and stepped back.

“I should have drowned.”