In early October, Open Ledger—the probate fifty-footer—took her first float test. Lino cried without shame when she held the waterline. Imani put a hand on his shoulder and let him have it. Destin walked the deck and named every problem like a man naming children he intended to raise. Keon, invited over from Infinity Liquid for the afternoon, stood at the bow and grinned in spite of himself when the engine caught clean.
"This one will take a year," Destin said.
"Then it takes a year," Imani said. "I'm not building a myth. I'm building a roster."
X.
In late October, Golden Harbor held its season-close supper under string lights on the lawn above the visitor docks. It was the kind of event that tried to be casual and failed in expensive ways: linen, shrimp, a band that played soft rock as if soft rock were folk music. Imani almost did not go. Tomas said she should be seen. Destin said he would go for twenty minutes and leave. Yara said she would go if there was a quiet corner. Keon said he would go if Destin went. So they went, Quaywright in a loose cluster, not matching, not performing unity, simply arriving together because arriving alone had its own costs.
Frank Calder shook Imani's hand in view of people who needed to see it. Adele Crowther appeared somehow on a guest list and hugged Yara as if Yara were a niece. Rick Sandler stayed near the bar. Grant and Valerie stood near the ice sculpture of a fish that was already losing its dorsal fin to the heat.
Halfway through the evening, Grant approached Imani while she was alone for thirty seconds near the lemonade.
"Miss Jackson."
"Mr. Holbrook."
"I won't take much of your night," he said. "I wanted you to know I resigned from the recreation committee last week. Not as theater. I was not useful there. I kept wanting the docks to stay a place that fit my habits. That is not what a committee is for."
Imani studied his face. He looked older than he had on the pier in August. Embarrassment, lived with, did that to people sometimes. Sometimes it did nothing at all.
"Resignation is a kind of honesty," she said. "It is not the same as repair."