"Grant."
"Don't," he said, and heard how defensive it sounded, and hated that he heard it. "I made an assumption. People make assumptions. The marina has rules about who walks those docks after four."
"Does it," Valerie said, not as a question. She wiped her hands on a towel. "Or do you have habits you dress up as rules?"
He went to the refrigerator and opened it and looked at nothing. Cold air spilled onto his knees. "Rick from the committee texted. There's a recreation meeting Thursday. He wants to talk about guest-berth standards again. He means the apprenticeship kids. He means Quaywright."
"And you?" Valerie asked. "What do you mean?"
Grant shut the refrigerator. His reflection in the dark glass of the microwave looked like a man who had been caught doing something small and ugly and could not decide whether the smallness made it better or worse.
"I mean I looked like an idiot on a pier in front of half the evening traffic," he said. "That's what I mean tonight."
Valerie went back to the peaches. The knife made soft, precise sounds. "You looked like something," she said. "Idiot might be the kindest word available. You can sit with that, or you can call Frank Calder in the morning and find out how much worse you made it."
He ate three bites of peach salad and then pushed the plate away. Valerie did not comment. She turned on the small television in the kitchen for the weather and they watched a cheerful woman point at a green blob of rain that would miss them entirely. Grant thought about calling Rick and telling him to kill the standards talk. He thought about calling his Charlotte client and admitting the boat was gone. He did neither. He rinsed his plate and went to the garage and stood in front of Second Draft's spare fenders as if fenders might advise him.
Valerie found him there. "You can come to bed," she said, "or you can invent a version of tonight where you're the victim. I know which one is easier. I've watched you do it with lost deals for years."
"This isn't a lost deal."
"No," she said. "It's worse. It's a mirror."
He slept badly. In the dark he tried to rebuild the scene so that his chuckle was kinder and his gesture was helpful and Imani Jackson's calm face was the unreasonable part. The rebuild would not hold. He kept seeing the portfolio change hands. He kept seeing the young man on the crew gangway looking at him as if Grant were a weather report nobody wanted.