“A collision isn’t one person hitting another—it’s when they both hit at once. A guy on a bike and a man in a car going bang.” He said this in a soft explaining tone. Then he frowned, pressing his lips together. He said, “It’s like I’m waiting for it to happen.”

“But it happened.” She thought, He hasn’t processed it, he’s still trying to understand it, he can’t face it.

“Did it?” he asked. “Most days I wake up happy, but I might remember a little detail or two. And then I shut it off. I figure someday I will wake up and I won’t remember anything. It won’t happen.” A smile flickered on his lips. “See?”

He was like a small boy in his denial; even his tone of voice was whispered and weak and bewildered, this sunburned and tattooed and muscular man, childlike.

“It was a man,” she said. “He died.”

He blinked again, a small boy, shrinking in his confusion.

“You ran into him.”

“Collision,” he said, correcting her. “It was dark.”

“I know. A bad night.”

“All that rain,” he said. “My sore foot on the brake.”

He seemed to be simplifying and excusing himself again. She spoke softly: “You killed that man.”

This registered as creases at the sides of his eyes, and in his hurt eyes too; the words had pierced him.

“And all that bad luck since then,” she said. She wanted to add, Bad for you, but it’s dogging me too, living with your darkness, losing the baby. So often with him—and often nursing her sicker, more fragile patients—she had two conversations, the one she spoke aloud, the one she suppressed and kept to herself.

He reached for her, took her small clean hand in his big cracked one, with an eye tattooed at the center of his palm. Clumsy consolation, but perhaps he understood her pain.

“You don’t know his name,” she said, and hearing nothing from him, added, “Do you?”

His “No” was the tissue of a breath.

“Or anything about him. Where he was born. His family, if he had one. How he lived. Where he’s buried.”

Still he clutched her soft hand in his rough hand against his leg as she sat before him, and she could feel something like thought in the flesh of his palm and his sinewy fingers. It helped that she was not facing him when she said this, that the voice rose from where she sat, muted, like smoke curling to his head while he stared at the branches outside that were lit by the window.

“We need to know.”

She spoke with insistence, and that tone, severe for the first time, checked him. He let go of her hand, dropped it, and got up and stretched, standing before her.

“This is so heavy,” he said.

“And?” she said, hoping for more.

“Let’s talk about it tomorrow.”