“Everyone does that,” he said, and from his sour tone she saw that she’d stung him. He was proud of the way he could hold a room of listeners with his stories—of surfing, of travel, of near escapes, of big waves, unusual people, strange meals, distant coasts. He sat on the bright beach like a Sun King and charmed men and wooed women with his stories. Hearing his stories, Hunter Thompson had said, “You could have been a writer.”

“Yes. Everyone does that, but not like you—the same stories, the same days, the same you. When did the accident happen?”

“Can’t remember.”

“Six weeks ago. It was a Saturday night. I marked it in my daybook.” She searched his face for a reaction. “What has happened since?”

He shook his head and blinked—not I don’t know, but It doesn’t matter.

“Nothing,” she said, answering her own question. “You sit, though you say you’re surfing. You don’t eat unless I’m cooking and urging you to. And nothing’s new, everything’s stale, and you know what that means?”

Still, he was unmoved; he examined his fingers, picking at them, his monkey grooming.

“You made me pregnant,” she said. “We were hopeful. I took it as a sign. Then I lost the baby. Losing it was the real sign.”

He seemed to strain, to take this in. He mumbled, “Blood in the water.”

She dropped to her knees and held him, and could not keep herself from tears, though she wasn’t crying.

“I remember the blood,” he said. “No one forgets blood.”

“It was a baby.” She said it in a pleading voice, and moaned in sorrow. Then she breathed deeply to clear her head, and when she had her composure back she continued. “It all adds up.”

“Some kind of curse,” he said, but without emotion—just asking.

“No, no,” she said, and gripped his legs and looked up at him in his chair. “It’s not witchcraft. It’s a shadow hanging over you—and so it’s over me too. Something like denial. Don’t you feel it?”

He made a face—it wasn’t dismissive, it was thoughtful: in some dim recess of his brain he had heard her. Instead of replying, he sighed, long and loud, a tremor of resignation.

“I don’t know,” he finally said.

To Olive this admission was like a victory: he was no longer indifferent, or certain in his arrogance. She said, “Tell me honestly, how do you feel?”

“You mean about the accident?”

“Yes, killing the man.”

“I feel it hasn’t happened yet.”

This took her by surprise. She said, “I don’t get it.”

“The collision,” he said.

“Hitting the man. Killing him.”