She sat for a while with her hands over her eyes. People imagined ownership as arriving somewhere glamorous. Ownership, for her, was a series of evenings like this: papers, bids, the knowledge that a young man on her payroll had just been reminded of a pier, and the refusal to turn that reminder into a story in which she was either endlessly noble or endlessly wounded. She was tired. She was also not confused. Confusion was a luxury she had stopped budgeting for around the time she signed her first lien release and realized half the men in the room had expected her to be someone's assistant.
Her sister called from Decatur. "You sound like you haven't sat down since March."
"I sat down Wednesday," Imani said. "In the harbor master's office. It wasn't restful."
"The broker?"
"The broker."
"Did he cry? Some of them love to cry after they get caught being ordinary."
Imani laughed once, surprised into it. "He did not cry. He admitted a committee problem. He voted with his mouth against a bad memo. I am not framing that. I am also not marrying it."
"Good," her sister said. "Eat something that isn't coffee. And call Mama's old pastor if you need someone to pray without asking you to forgive on a schedule."
"I am not forgiving on a schedule," Imani said.
"I know," her sister said. "I'm reminding the part of you that was raised in church to confuse grace with housework."
After the call, Imani walked down into the yard where the fifty-footer sat under lights, taped and unfinished, a future that would demand the same careful work Infinity Liquid had demanded. She put her palm on the dusty hull. "Not yet," she told it, as if boats understood waiting. "We finish what we started first."
Behind her, the night watchman, an older Dominican man named Lino who had worked the yard since before Quaywright owned it, said, "She'll keep. They always keep if you don't rush the glass."