He looked at her for a long time.
"Who's operating the crane is my decision," he said. "Who stands watch on my bridge is my decision. Not the office's."
"It is," she said. "And I'm asking you to make the right ones. If you were sitting where I am, and I was standing where you are, you'd say every word of it. You know you would. You'd say it with fewer slides."
He laughed then, a short broken sound, and put his hand over his eyes, and stood that way on the bridge wing for perhaps ten seconds, and then he took his hand away and nodded once.
"Give me an hour," he said. "Get me the forms."
Kemble took it worse. He stood in the main saloon in front of the painting of the horse in the fog and said that Keelhaven had no authority to report anything to anyone without consulting the owner, and Octavia said that the ISM Code and the Cayman Merchant Shipping Law said otherwise and that he was welcome to have the family's lawyers read them. He said that the footage was marina property, illegally obtained, and that she should be very careful, and she said that she had requested it in writing as the DPA for a vessel under casualty investigation and handed him a copy of the letter, which Dex had printed twelve minutes earlier, and he read it, and his face changed. He said that Keelhaven would not survive this, that the family would move the boat to Fairlead before Christmas, and she said that was the family's right.
Then he said the thing she had been waiting for, the thing that told her he had understood the numbers before she ever came aboard. "If it's about the crew costs, the broker's holding two hundred and forty thousand dollars in APA. We could advance the agency fees from that and reconcile at the end of the charter."
"The APA belongs to the charterer, Mr. Kemble. It's for their fuel and their food and their dockage during their charter. It's not the owner's money and it's not mine." She held out her phone. "Mireille Tarrant's on the line, if you'd like to ask her yourself. I'd rather you didn't. She's already said no."
He did not take the phone. He went out onto the aft deck and called the Haverford family office, and fifteen minutes later he came back in and held out his own phone to her, and said, stiffly, "Mr. Haverford would like to speak with you."