"I know." He glanced toward Keon, who was laughing at something Destin had said, the laugh short and real. "If your bow hand ever needs a reference for a license application, I will write one that sticks to his work. Not to my guilt."
"If he needs a reference, Destin will write it," Imani said. "Or I will. You are not in his chain of trust yet. Maybe you never will be. That is allowed."
Grant nodded. The fish sculpture collapsed a little more. Valerie called his name from near the shrimp. He went. Imani watched Valerie put a hand briefly on Grant's back, not soothing exactly, more like checking that a piece of furniture had not shifted in a storm.
Imani stood with the lemonade sweating in her hand and felt no triumph, no soft montage ending, only the ordinary weight of a season completed without disaster. Tomas appeared at her elbow with two napkins and the expression of a man who had already planned the exit.
"You ready to leave?" he asked.
"Soon," she said. "Tell Destin the apprentices can go whenever they want. Nobody owes this lawn their evening."
She walked down toward the water before she left, away from the band, to the wide wooden pier where it had started. The late light was gone; the marina wore its night face now, boats dark except for courtesy lamps, water black and soft. Infinity Liquid sat in her slip like a fact. Imani leaned on the metal railing—Grant's railing, anyone's railing—and let the night air touch her face.
She thought of her mother's voice in an Atlanta kitchen, saying peace is not the same as quiet. She thought of Keon's careful hands and Destin's refusal to sail under incomplete authority. She thought of Frank's slow reading of a bad memo, and of Valerie telling a young man he did not owe a comfortable answer, and of Yara stealing shrimp in a napkin because love on a crew sometimes looked like food. She thought of Grant's apology in the office and his resignation months later, two different sizes of the same attempt, neither of them a cure.
Behind her, footsteps. Not Grant. Yara, with a plate wrapped in a napkin, as predicted.
"I stole you shrimp," Yara said. "The band is playing the same song again."
Imani took a shrimp. It was cold and good. "We're leaving after this," she said.
"Good." Yara stood beside her at the rail, not speaking for a while. Then: "For what it's worth, the crew is proud of the season. Not of the pier. Of the season. Of the work."