She read it twice and then showed it to Silvino, who read it and turned away for a moment and looked very hard at the fuel dock.
Out past the harbor mouth, the Coriolis was small now, a dark shape with a white bone in her teeth, rising and falling on the first long swells coming in from the open Atlantic. Somewhere on board, Octavia hoped, a tired Welshman was going down a narrow set of stairs to his cabin to sleep for eight hours, and a young woman from Mauritius was standing at a long sweep of black glass in the dusk with her hand near the throttles, looking at the clock, because she always looked at the clock. It was their passage now. Octavia had done everything that paper could do. The rest belonged to the sea and the weather and nine tired people and two new ones, and to a flag-state inspector in Antigua, and to an old man who would make up his mind about all of them when his boat was safely tied up.
When the yacht had gone behind Castle Hill, she picked up her duffel.
"You can go out the main gate," Silvino said. "I'll open it. It's closer."
She thought about it. Then she smiled, for the first time in two days.
"I'll go out the way I came in," she said. "There'll be somebody new coming through it tonight. Somebody always is."
He walked with her as far as the green gate anyway. On the far side of it, under the security light by the dumpsters, a girl of about twenty was standing with a duffel bag over her shoulder and a phone in her hand, reading something on the screen with her lips moving, a pair of brand-new white sneakers on her feet. She looked up at them through the bars, uncertain, and said she was supposed to be starting on one of the boats on B pier in the morning, and was this the right way in.
Octavia held the gate open for her.
"It's the right way," she said. "Welcome aboard. What's your name?"