"Listen up," Lou said, before anyone had so much as touched the gangplank. "We're on a schedule. Water, rope, repairs, and out before nightfall. Nobody wanders off chasing a card game or a woman or whatever fool notion crosses your mind between here and the dock. In and out, clean and quick."

Nate raised a hand. "Define wandering off."

"Anything that isn't water, rope, or repairs."

"That's most things."

"Then most things are off the table today." Lou clapped him once on the shoulder, hard enough to end the conversation, and led the way down the plank with the confident stride of a man who fully intended to keep his own rule.

He kept it for the better part of an hour.

Governor's Harbor smelled like tar and overripe citrus, which Nate said was better than smelling like nothing at all, which was as much enthusiasm as any of them could manage after eleven days at sea living on salt pork and grim silence. The storm had left its mark on the ship as well as on all of them, a cracked rail support near the bow and a length of planking that had sprung enough to groan under a man's full weight, small things, nothing that couldn't wait a week, but nothing Lou wanted to test against open water either. He'd already arranged for a carpenter to look at both before the tide turned. Water, rope, repairs, and a market that wasn't going to ask too many questions about a crew that had clearly not come by their cargo honestly. That was the whole of the plan. Nobody expected the morning to become anything more complicated than a shopping list.

Lou split the crew into pairs before the gangplank was even secured, because a town like this one worked best when nobody stood still long enough to draw attention. He kept Vincent with him, mostly because Vincent had a gift for knowing which merchants would look the other way about where a coil of good rope had come from, and sent Nate off toward the chandlery end of the market with a purse and strict instructions not to spend all of it on things that weren't rope. Behind them near the waterline, the carpenter he'd hired that morning had already started prying up the cracked plank near the bow, muttering about storm damage and asking twice the fair price for his trouble.

The letter was still in his coat. He hadn't taken it out since the storm, hadn't needed to, the shape of it against his ribs was enough of a reminder on its own. He caught himself thinking about it anyway, about Kell's name sitting unanswered at the bottom of a page his father had written and never sent, and made himself stop. There would be time for that conversation. Today was rope.

"You're doing the thing again," Vincent said, without looking up from the length of hemp he was testing between his hands.

"What thing."

"The thing where you go somewhere else behind your own eyes." Vincent held the rope up to the light, apparently satisfied, and nodded toward the merchant to signal he'd take it. "You've done it since the crate."

"I'm allowed to think."

"Didn't say you weren't." Vincent counted coin into the merchant's palm with the quick, exact motions of someone who'd once made a living not getting caught doing worse than honest trade. "Just noticed is all."

Lou let it go, because Vincent noticing things and choosing not to push on them was as close to comfortable silence as the boy was capable of, and pushing back would only make him retreat further. They worked their way down the row of stalls, Lou hauling what Vincent selected, both of them half-listening to the general noise of a port town going about its morning, gulls and hammers and somebody's mule refusing to be led anywhere useful.

Once, without any explanation, Vincent steered them down a side row instead of the main path. When Lou asked why, he only said the other row smelled better, which wasn't remotely true, and left it at that.

He did not notice Nate had stopped moving until Vincent did.

Nate stood a dozen yards off near a stall stacked with coiled line, one hand still closed around the sample he'd been examining, staring across the open market square like a man who'd forgotten there was a purse in his other hand at all. Lou followed his line of sight and found a woman on the far side hauling a crate of her own, dark hair pulled back the same practical way he remembered, arguing with a dockhand about the price of something in a voice that carried clean across the square even before he placed it.

Isabela looked up at the same moment. Whatever she'd been about to say to the dockhand died somewhere in her throat.

For one unguarded second neither of them managed to look like anything other than exactly what they were, which was two people who had thought, without ever quite saying so, that they would never see each other again and were now finding out how badly they'd wanted to be wrong about that. Then, almost in the same breath, both of their faces did the same thing, a visible scramble back toward something that could pass for casual, shoulders dropping, expressions smoothing, the whole performance about as convincing as a man claiming he hadn't been running when he was clearly still catching his breath.

"Hey," Nate said. "It's you."

"Hey," Isabela said, at the exact same time, in the exact same tone, which undid the entire performance in one stroke and left them both laughing before either had crossed half the distance between them.

Lou let Vincent carry the rope and trailed after them at a slower pace, close enough to be useful, far enough not to loom. Whatever this was, it deserved a minute that didn't have him standing over it.

"You're a long way from a chandlery counter," Nate said, once they'd stopped in front of each other and apparently run out of things that could be said with just a look.

"I'm a long way from a lot of things," Isabela said, and something in the line of her mouth flattened before she caught it and softened it back into something lighter. "Turns out a shop that gets associated with the men who started a brawl in the middle of the market doesn't stay a shop for very long. Some very unhappy privateers had opinions about their reputations, and my counter was the closest thing they could reach to make a point about it."

Nate's grin faltered. Lou felt the same drop in his own stomach, quick and unpleasant, the particular flavor of guilt that comes from watching someone hand you a bill you didn't know you owed.

"That's on us," Nate said.

"It's on the two idiots who started swinging first, and last I checked that wasn't me," Isabela said, but there was no real edge under it, more the practiced tone of someone who'd made peace with a bad turn by finding the joke buried inside it. "I'm not saying it to make you feel like something crawled out of the bilge. I'm saying it because you should know, and because I'm done pretending I don't enjoy watching your face when you find out."

"I do feel like something crawled out of the bilge."

"Good. Sit with that a while." She said it warmly enough that it landed as forgiveness rather than punishment, and Nate's shoulders came down an inch.

It was only then that Lou noticed the second woman standing a step behind Isabela, arms crossed, watching the whole exchange with the specific patience of someone who had clearly heard this story already and was waiting to see how the new audience took it. Red hair pulled back under a plain kerchief, sleeves shoved up past the elbow, and an expression that suggested she found the entire dock, the entire town, and quite possibly the entire ocean mildly beneath her tolerance for the day.

"This is Brigid," Isabela said. "She helped me get back on my feet when Nassau stopped being an option."

Brigid gave the smallest nod, nothing more, her eyes moving over Lou the way a woman checks a horse she has no intention of buying. "A pirate," she said, not a question.

"A captain," Lou said.

"That's a pirate with better manners about it." She said it flatly, without much interest either way, and turned her attention back to the crate she'd been hauling before any of this started, apparently satisfied she'd learned everything about him she needed to for now.

Lou didn't push it. He found, a little to his own surprise, that he didn't want to. There was something in the economy of her attention, the way she'd sized him up and moved on without bothering to perform either interest or dislike, that made him more curious rather than less, though he kept that particular observation to himself.

Vincent, unloading the last of the rope beside him, noticed anyway. "You're staring," he said, not looking up.

"I'm not staring."

"You're staring at the back of her head like it owes you money."

"It might."

Vincent almost smiled at that, which was rare enough that Lou noticed it, and said nothing else.

Later, with the crew scattered through the stalls, he saw her at a fruit seller's cart a few rows down. She bought a peach, looked it over once with the same flat assessment she'd given him, and bit into it right there in the open, juice running down her wrist, wiping it off on her sleeve without a glance at anyone who might be watching her enjoy it. Lou realized, a beat too late, that he was one of them. He looked away. Across the row, Isabela had seen him look, and said nothing, which from her was its own kind of remark.

They spent the better part of the afternoon in the market together, Isabela and Nate falling into the same easy rhythm they'd clearly never fully let go of, trading the kind of small talk that circles the thing it actually wants to say without ever quite landing on it. Brigid kept to her own tasks, sharp and efficient, answering Lou when he asked her something directly but volunteering nothing, and it was only once, late in the afternoon, that she said anything unprompted at all.

She caught him watching Isabela and Nate with an expression he hadn't managed to school in time, something that looked, for just a moment, like a man taking notes on a kind of ease he didn't have much practice with himself. When she spoke, it wasn't unkind, but it wasn't soft either.

"Whatever you're working up to saying to me," she said, "save your breath. I've known women who lost husbands, brothers, entire futures to men exactly your sort, charming right up until the sea decided otherwise. I've no interest in adding my own name to that list. So whatever's crossing your face right now, you can put it away."

"I haven't said anything."

"You didn't need to." She held his eyes a beat longer than the warning strictly required, then went back to her work without waiting to see how he took it, which told him more than the warning itself had.

By the time the crew regrouped at the gangplank with water casks refilled, rope coiled, the bow plank set flush again, and considerably less coin than they'd started with, the sun had gone low and orange over the harbor, and Lou found himself in no particular hurry to give the order to cast off.

Nate hauled the last cask up the plank behind him and couldn't resist it. "Water, rope, repairs, and out before nightfall, was it?"

"It was."

"And where exactly did the schedule go?"

"It's around here somewhere." Lou didn't even bother sounding convinced of it himself.

"You're smiling," Nate said. "You don't do that."

"I do it plenty."

"Not like that." Nate grinned, the specific grin of a man delighted to have company in his own foolishness.

"There's a difference between not today and no," Lou said, mostly to himself, looking back once at the dock, at Brigid's retreating back beside Isabela's. "There will be."

Nate laughed at that, properly laughed, the first easy sound either of them had made since the storm, and for a moment the letter in Lou's coat and the ring in Vincent's pocket and the name Kell sitting unanswered somewhere ahead of them all felt like they belonged to some other, more complicated version of this same voyage. It didn't last. It never did. But Lou let himself have the moment anyway, because a man who couldn't take a good afternoon when the sea offered him one didn't deserve the next one either.

Vincent was the last aboard, pausing at the rail with one boot still on the gangplank. Near the far end of the quay, a man in a dark coat stood too still among the last of the market crowd, watching the ship rather than the water, and when he saw Vincent had noticed him his eyes dropped, not to Vincent's face but to the exact place in his coat where the ring sat, and then he turned, unhurried, and walked off between two warehouses without once picking up his pace. Vincent watched the space where he'd been for a moment after he was gone.

"What is it," Lou asked.

"Nothing," Vincent said, which was not the same as answering, and his hand found its way, briefly, to the pocket where the ring still sat, before he turned and went below without another word.