At the novel’s emotional core is the hit-and-run death of little Sissy Radley over 30 years in the past. The struggle to handle that death is common to all of the novel’s principal characters. It is an accident—no one really is to blame, yet everyone feels guilty. However, it haunts Vincent King, who was driving. It shapes his emotional life of self-loathing and lacerating introspection. He yearns to be punished even beyond a prison sentence. Star never entirely recovers from her sister’s death—she blames herself because she and her friends stayed out too long that night and caused her little sister to go looking for her on the dark streets.

Like Vincent, Star spends most of her adult life loathing herself, disappearing in a fog of alcohol and prescription medication, debasing herself in the strip club and a long series of meaningless one-night stands, and ultimately submitting to Darke’s violent outbursts. For his part, as a law enforcement officer, Walk struggles to understand where justice was served in the hit-and-run. He recognizes Vincent’s authentic soul-searching and remorse and the nature of the accident itself, and he determines to right the wrong of Vincent’s long incarceration by lying under oath.