Imani stood. She did not offer her hand. She did not refuse a hand that wasn't offered. "I accept the apology as words," she said. "I do not accept it as a finished thing. Words are easy on a Wednesday in an office. The docks are where we find out if you meant them."
She left with Tomas. In the hallway, Tomas exhaled as if he had been holding a plate level for an hour.
"You were hard," he said, not critically.
"I was accurate," Imani said. "Hard is what people call accuracy when they preferred a softer story."
They walked into the late heat. Somewhere a pressure washer started up, loud and ordinary. Imani found that she was hungry, which surprised her. She bought a sandwich from the chandlery cafe and ate it in Tomas's car before they drove back to the yard, because she refused to let a broker's apology steal her blood sugar on top of everything else.
That night she called Destin, not to debrief Holbrook—Destin would get the useful summary from Tomas—but to ask how the bow winch was behaving after the yard's last adjustment. Destin said it was behaving. Then he said, "Keon asked if he should be angry for you."
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him he can be angry for himself about what he heard. He doesn't have to manage your anger. You've got your own."
Imani stood at her kitchen sink and watched a drop of water cling to the faucet and fall. "That's the right answer."
"I know," Destin said. "I had a captain tell me the opposite when I was twenty. Took me years to unlearn it."
After they hung up she washed the sink until the stainless shone, an old calming ritual, and then forced herself to watch half a comedy special without checking email. She managed twenty minutes. It counted.
VI.