As soon as he started to swear, she left. And driving to the hospital, always the same road, feeling the potholes with her hands on the steering wheel, she repeated the sentence she’d practiced, the tactful farewell—You’re better off alone—then thought, No.

“I’m better off alone,” she said in the mild mumble she used in the car, talking to herself—talking, because saying something aloud helped her remember, filled her with resolve.

Luana always asked how she was feeling, and because Olive said, “Fine,” and Luana didn’t believe her, Luana kept asking, as on this morning.

“I was wondering,” Olive said, instead of replying directly, “is there still a vacant room in the nurses’ quarters?”

Approaching her, arms out, Luana smiled in sympathy, almost in gratitude, and she embraced Olive in a motherly hug, her whole soft body pressed against her, as if to give her warmth. Their foreheads touched, Luana’s sweetened with soap, her thick arms enclosing Olive.

“Yes, got one for you,” Luana said, and seemed sure that this request for a room meant that what she suspected was true: Olive was ailing.

“Because I’m going to start working nights.”

“Sure,” the woman said, and hugged her closer, feeling that this was an excuse for the ailment—or was it the guy?—and she did not want to give any details.

Olive moved some of her clothes from Sharkey’s closets and drawers on a day of big waves, and as she was putting them in her car he texted her that he was all right—reassuring her, as though she might be worried about him. He did not ask about her.

He never asked. On the high-surf days she drove to Sunset or Waimea, or farther down the road to Alligators or Leftovers or Marijuana’s, and found him with her binoculars. It was as though he were not a man at all—certainly not one who’d been jarred by an accident (“I ran into a drunk homeless guy”). No, he was like a rare form of marine life, a sea mammal in the foam, the water dog he claimed to be, slipping down the face of a wave and riding it nearly to where it broke, and instead of crawling to shore, cutting across the lip and paddling and diving beneath the waves until he was out to sea, in the lineup again, preparing to drop in.

At the end of the day he would go home, drink a beer, make himself an omelet, and sit, lit by the sunset, inhaling the last of the light into his body. He was fine. He said so in his occasional messages, telling her he’d had a good day, less like a text to his lover than an announcement to an anxious world, eager for the latest bulletin from Joe Sharkey.