Chapter 15: Christening

I looked at the picture on Bess's phone.

Arabella on the Wakefield dock in white, pearls in her ears, her hand on a big brass button on a podium.

Above her, Hull 114 hung in the slings of the travel lift, a hundred forty feet of white hull and dark glass.

"I know," I said.

Bess lowered the phone.

"You know?"

"I set up the date. In March."

Seth had stopped two steps away from me with his arms still half open.

He put them down slowly.

"Charlie. Is she going to be okay? The boat?"

"Ask me tomorrow," I said.

I slept nine hours that night.

I made myself.

On Saturday I didn't go anywhere near the Wakefield yard.

At ten-thirty I took a mug of coffee out to Seth's hammock and climbed in with my feet up.

Bess climbed in after me, because Bess didn't believe a hammock was for one person.

She propped her phone on my stomach.

The Wakefield Marine livestream had nine thousand people on it.

Seth brought out his lawn chair and set it beside us.

Gran and the two old shipwrights stood behind him.

Nobody worked.

On the screen the Wakefield dock was packed.

White chairs, a string quartet, a tent for the press.

My mother in a big straw hat.

My father in the front row in his blazer.

Hugo, standing by the podium with his hands behind his back, the way he stood at board meetings.

Archer, in pink, in the second row, checking his phone.

And in the middle of the front row, the buyer.

He was forty and wore a gray hoodie to a christening, which was how you knew he had sixty-one million dollars.

Arabella stepped up to the microphone.

Archer's ring flashed when she touched her hair.

"Thank you all so much for coming," she said, and her voice wobbled in the exact right place.

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