"Branko—"
He held up his hand. "I don't care for myself. I swear to you on the Madonna. There's nothing they can do to me that I didn't already do." He looked at the photograph, and away from it, fast, the way you take your hand off a stove. "But Vesna has to live here. Katica has to go to school here. If they say Branko Perovich killed his own boy for forty tons of mackerel, then that's what her name means for the rest of her life. You of all people. You understand what a name means in this town."
Duncan looked down at the fritule.
"Zoran and Jure are going to say it was a sea," Branko said quietly. "Because it was a sea, Duncan. You were there. A big sea came on the starboard quarter and she went over."
"That's part of what happened."
"It's the part that matters." Branko leaned forward. His eyes were bloodshot and very tired. "You think with the ports open she doesn't go over, in a sea like that? Maybe. Maybe not. God knows. And God's not going to be at the hearing. Every boat in this harbor plates her ports when she's deck-loading. Half of them have the alarm pulled because the switches are junk. If they hang me for that, they have to hang the whole fleet. And maybe they should. But it won't bring him back."
He got up and stood at the window with his back to the room, looking down at the harbor.
"He wanted to go to Long Beach State," he said. "Marine biology. I told him one more season. Help me pay off the block, then you go to school and you never touch a fish again." His shoulders moved. "One more season. One more set."
When Duncan left, Katica was sitting on the front step with a library book. He had to step around her, and as he did she said, without looking up, "Are you going to tell on my dad?"
He stopped. He looked at the neat white part in her black hair.
"I don't know," he said. It was the only honest thing he had.