"I heard him too," Imani said. "Keon doesn't need to carry that for me."
"He will anyway," Yara said quietly. "They always do."
Imani looked at her. Yara did not look away. Between them passed the kind of understanding that did not require naming every piece of it: that young people watched older people get insulted and learned either how to shrink or how to stand, and that standing was expensive either way, and that companies which pretended otherwise lost their best people to quieter docks.
"I'll speak to Keon," Imani said. "And Frank Calder. Not tonight. Tonight we finish the pre-season. Destin, I want the fire drill logged before dark. Yara, if Holbrook comes to the passerelle, you do not let him aboard. Tomas handles him. Tomas, if he becomes a problem, you call the harbor office, not me. I am not performing a scene for a broker on my first signed night."
Tomas nodded. Destin nodded. Yara refilled the water pitcher as if water might be the thing that kept the evening from tipping.
Outside, the gold light had gone a little copper. Grant Holbrook was no longer at the railing. Imani did not look for him. She went forward to find Keon Blake on the bow, a twenty-two-year-old with careful hands and a new Quaywright polo still stiff at the collar. She asked him about the line work and the winch and whether he had eaten, and only after those things did she say, "What you heard on the pier was not about you. It was about him. I need you to keep doing the job you came to do."
Keon swallowed. His eyes were dark and alert and trying very hard not to show how much they had already filed away. "Yes, Miss Jackson."
"Imani is fine when guests aren't listening," she said. "Miss Jackson when they are. You'll learn the difference."
"I already know the difference," Keon said, and then looked as if he wished he hadn't.
Imani almost smiled. "Good. Then you're ahead of some people twice your age."
She left him with the bow line and went aft again, where Destin was already laying out the fire drill cards. For twenty minutes the boat became a machine of calm urgency: alarms, routes, who grabs what, who counts heads. Keon moved too fast at first and then corrected. Yara narrated guest pathways without sounding like she was narrating. Tomas timed them on his phone and wrote the numbers in the log as if numbers could protect people.
When it was done, Destin said, "Acceptable." Coming from him, it was praise.
Imani stood on the swim platform and looked at the water. It slapped gently against the hull. She thought of the first boat she had ever signed for—smaller, uglier, bought with a loan that had made her sister swear and then wire money anyway—and of how every signature since had felt both less terrifying and more consequential. This one carried apprentices. This one carried a harbor agreement. This one carried, whether she liked it or not, the memory of a man telling her she did not belong on wood her company paid to use.