"Miss Jackson," he said. "The captain is waiting for your authorization."
Grant's smirk did not fall so much as evacuate. He pulled the aviators down his nose with two fingers. The gold light hit his eyes full on. For a second he looked younger and stupider, which was only fair.
Imani Jackson took the portfolio from Tomas Rivas without looking at Grant Holbrook again. The leather was warm from Tomas's hand. She opened the flap just far enough to see the harbor stamp on the top sheet, then closed it. She had learned not to perform surprise for men who had already spent their surprise on her.
"Thank you," she said to Tomas. "Is Destin aboard?"
"He's on the aft deck. Yara has the galley ready if you want coffee before you sign."
"I want to sign first," Imani said. "Coffee after."
She walked past Grant. Her shoes—practical, dark, scuffed at the toes in a way his loafers would never be—made a clean sound on the wood. Tomas followed. Grant stood with his sunglasses halfway down his face and the marina suddenly louder around him: a halyard tapping, a gull, someone's laughter from a flybridge two slips over. A young Black man in a new polo was coming up the crew gangway with a duffel, and he glanced once at Grant and once at Imani's back and understood something he should not have had to understand on his first night.
The yacht at the end of the pier carried her name across the stern in raised letters that caught the sun in pieces: INFINITY LIQUID. From certain angles, if you were hurrying or vain, you only caught the last of it.
Imani did not hurry. She had learned, years ago, that rushing on a pier made you look like you were asking permission.
II.
Infinity Liquid was eighty-six feet of white hull and dark glass, a vessel that had spent two winters looking like a rich man's regret and one spring looking like a project nobody wanted to finish. Quaywright Marine had finished it. Quaywright Marine was Imani's company: not a marina, not a pure salvage outfit, though they had done salvage when salvage was honest money and the paperwork was clean. Quaywright bought vessels that had fallen into bureaucratic limbo—liens, abandoned refits, estates that could not agree—and brought them back into lawful charter under apprenticeship crews. The apprenticeship was the part that made some people at Golden Harbor smile with their mouths and not their eyes. The charter revenue was the part that made the harbor authority sign papers in March and mean them, at least on paper.
Imani had come to the dock today because the season packet required her wet signature and the harbor master's countersignature in the same forty-eight-hour window, and because Captain Destin Ward refused, as a matter of principle, to take a boat out under incomplete authority. Destin was forty-four, navy-built, with a voice that never needed to rise to be heard. He stood on the aft deck in a pressed white shirt and dark trousers, one hand on the rail, watching her come aboard the way a good captain watched weather: without drama, without missing anything.
"Miss Jackson," he said.