Olive was surprised by his solemnity—it seemed stagy and forced. But he was frowning, as though he’d just remembered these things and was speaking about them with reverence for the first time. Why he was repeating them now she had no idea, but if she mentioned that, he’d be self-conscious.

When he’d wooed her with stories, he’d held her attention, because all of them were fresh, and her eyes had brightened as he spoke. He was a good talker, and it surprised her that, storyteller that he was, he had never written a line—he was stumped with a pen, he’d doodle a little, then crumple the paper. But it didn’t matter. He had stories.

Testing him, because she’d suffered all day with the memory, she said, “You killed a man a few weeks ago. You don’t even know his name.”

He shook his head, as though correcting her. “Ran into a drunk homeless guy.”

She roused him early the next morning, before he could protest. She said, “You’re coming with me, don’t eat,” and he sat stunned and sleepy in the car.

“‘Nobody heard him, the dead man,’” she said on the road.

“Which one?” Sharkey said.

“It’s a poem. We learned it at school.”

“Poem,” he said, expelling the word in a flat breath, as though it were meaningless.

“The dead man moans,

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.”

“Dead men don’t moan,” Sharkey said. “Dead men are gone.”

Olive looked sideways at him and, seeing that they were near the emergency entrance of the hospital, decided not to reply. Sharkey allowed himself to be checked in, Olive doing the talking. He was booked for an MRI and assigned a cubicle. Olive left him in the care of a nurse, and glancing back, she saw him being handed a flimsy hospital gown and cloth slippers. When she stopped in after lunch he was cross-legged on the bed; and the next time she looked in he was being wheeled back to his cubicle, a big man in baby clothes but still smiling.

After the long day he crept to the sofa on the lanai and, like a cat folding itself, curled into a ball of repose. He resumed staring at the setting sun, in the posture of the previous day.

He began to speak.

Olive said, “Park it,” and then quickly, “I think you’ve told me that before.”

Waiting for the results, because Olive asked for the specialist at Queen’s to read the scans, Sharkey sat, sometimes curled and catlike, sometimes in his yoga posture.

“The doctor cleared you,” Olive said in a disbelieving whisper two days later.

“What doctor?”

Instead of answering that, she said, “I’m worried about you.”

“Olive—the fretter.”