I could feel her studying the side of my face for a few seconds before she answered in a soft voice, “I take that as a compliment, Kennesaw.”

“It was meant as one, Patricia. I’m glad to see you again,” I said as I reached over and gave her forearm a squeeze.

We watched in silence for a bit as the water ahead of us broadened to meet the mouth of the mighty Savannah River. I lifted a hand and pointed as we came past the Cockspur Island Lighthouse and turned eastward.

“That’s Daufuskie, out in the distance,” I said. “Two ways to get there. We can swing out the mouth of the river, offshore a ways, and then come back up the channel just south of the island, or”—I jerked a thumb back over my left shoulder—“we can go upriver and take the Intracoastal Waterway. With the incoming tide, it’s sixes and two threes—take your pick.”

A pilot boat sped across our bow, heading out to the sea buoy to meet an inbound freighter. I gave the wheel a quarter turn so as to cut the pilot boat’s wake at an angle. Patricia put a hand on the console as we rode over the waves.

“I see that place almost every day when I go for a walk on North Beach,” she said as she nodded to the island in the distance. “But I’ve never been there. It’s always been a mysterious place to me.”

She stared at the low green line of treetops floating out on the horizon. “Let’s come in from the ocean—like we were seeing it for the first time. Like we were the first people to ever see the place.”

We each turned to the other and I saw a look of expectant wonder on her face, like the happy look of a child contemplating an imminent adventure.

“From seaward it is,” I said with a smile of my own and gave the wheel a turn to starboard that pointed us out toward the seemingly limitless expanse of the great Atlantic Ocean.

“This is a beautiful boat, Kennesaw,” she said, admiringly, as she looked around the pilothouse and out across the deck. “Does she have a story to tell?”

I kept my eye on a couple of small fishing boats a few hundred meters ahead of us as I replied, “Miss Rosalie has been my home for the last several years.”

“I’ve gathered that much already. It was listed as your residence when I first met you. But where did it come from, and when did it . . . she become your home? This isn’t an interrogation, Tanner. I’m just interested. You know—call it women’s curiosity.”

I glanced over and saw that she had a teasing smile on her face.