"Afternoon," he said. "You looking for one of the boats, hon? Crew entrance is around the side. Go back out to the road, take a left, past the boatyard dumpsters, there's a green gate with a keypad. Your captain gives you the code." He lifted his hand to point, the way he had pointed for four years. "This one here's just for owners and guests."
Octavia Foster had been awake for thirty-one hours, and so for a moment the words arrived in her the way sounds arrive in a person under anesthesia, from a long way off and with no particular meaning attached. Crew entrance. Around the side. Green gate. Then they landed, and she looked at the man who had said them.
He was in his sixties, short and thick through the chest, with a face the wind had been working on for decades and big square hands, one of which was still lifted, pointing helpfully past her toward the road. He wore a navy windbreaker with SACHUEST YACHT HAVEN stitched on it in white and a radio clipped to the shoulder. A laminated card stuck up out of his shirt pocket. There was nothing in his face she could have called contempt. That was what made her look at him longer than she meant to. He was not sneering at her. He was being kind. He had looked at her and drawn a conclusion so fast and so completely that it had not occurred to him to wonder whether it was a conclusion at all, and having drawn it he was trying to be nice to the person he had decided she was.
She had been that person. That was the strange part. She had been exactly that person, at exactly this spot, on a June morning nineteen years ago, at twenty-two, with a duffel bag a lot like this one and a pair of white sneakers she had bought at a Payless in Fort Lauderdale the night before because the agency said whites, and someone in a fiberglass booth had pointed her around the side to a chain-link gate past the dumpsters, and she had gone. She remembered the dumpsters. She remembered the chain-link gate with its rusty padlock hanging open, and the feeling of walking through it into a world she had seen only on the agency's website, and thinking: all right. All right. Here I am.
"I know where it is," she said.
He nodded, relieved, as though she had made his day easier. "Great. Have a good one."
She could have told him. She had told people before, in airports and in hotel lobbies and once, memorably, at a yard in La Ciotat, where a French foreman had tried to send her to the laundry. She was trying to decide whether she had the energy for any of them, and whether it mattered, and whether there was any point, on this day of all days, in standing in a turnaround in Newport and explaining to a tired old man in a windbreaker what the letters DPA meant, when she heard someone running on the pier.
It was Dex. Dex Linnell was twenty-six years old and had worked for Keelhaven Yacht Management for eleven months as her compliance coordinator, which meant that he did everything she did not have time to do, and he was very good at it, and he was not built for running. He came up C pier at a flat-footed gallop in a Keelhaven polo identical to hers, with a tablet clutched against his chest and his lanyard flying out behind him over his shoulder, and he hit the main gate from the inside, discovered it was locked, rattled it once, and said through the bars, out of breath, loud enough that the young woman at the concierge desk inside the lounge looked up from her screen:
"Miss Foster. Oh, thank God. Miss Foster, the captain is waiting for your authorization."
The man in the windbreaker turned around and looked at Dex. Then he turned back and looked at her. She watched it happen in his face, the way you can watch a squall line come across open water, a darkening that moves from one edge to the other, and she found to her surprise that she did not enjoy it at all.