It was the quietest room on the boat. It always was. The windows ran the full width of the bridge, raked forward, and beyond them the harbor was all moving light, the wind tearing the tops off the little waves out past Goat Island and the Newport Bridge standing up out of the haze to the north like a line drawn in pencil. Inside it was cool and dim and smelled of electronics and coffee. The helm station was a long sweep of black glass, the radars and the ECDIS and the engine monitoring screens all on standby, glowing faintly, and on the chart table behind them somebody had laid out a paper chart of the western North Atlantic, the old-fashioned way, with a course line penciled in from Brenton Reef to St. David's Head, Bermuda, six hundred and thirty-some miles, and dividers lying across it.
Aled was standing at the chart table with his back to her. He had come in from the bridge wing while she was in the saloon. He turned around.
He had gotten old. That was her first thought and she was ashamed of it. She had last seen him in person three years ago, at a safety conference in Fort Lauderdale, where he had sat in the back row of her presentation on fatigue management and asked one question at the end, a hard, fair question about rest-hour records on boats with guests aboard, and then bought her a drink afterward and told her he was proud of her and that her slides had too many words on them. But he stood up straight. He always stood up straight.
"Foster," he said.
"Aled."
"You came up the back way."
"I did."
"Old habits." He almost smiled. "How's the boy?"
"Awake. He asked about you."
That landed on him. She saw it land. He moved the dividers a quarter of an inch.