“Polite?” she cried. “No! We were in love. You happening didn’t change a thing.” Not strictly accurate, maybe, but about that she didn’t really know, herself. “It wasn’t 1890, you know. Nobody was that polite.”

At the door, she turned. “You know,” she said, “that was a pretty crummy crack.” Her throat was tight and her voice sounded squeaky. “’Polite!’”

He studied her. His eyes were as gray and soft as his father’s. And as inscrutable. “I’m sorry,” he said. “OK?”

“I guess.” She went down to darn his sock.

Chapter 4

CHAPTER 4

He was suddenly in the shade. He had drifted ten degrees off course, and the rising sun was flirting with the leech of the mainsail. The tempting, elusive shadow tensed and annoyed him but brought him back. He spun the wheel quickly and checked the wake to see how far he had wandered from the track. It curved significantly before it disappeared among the swells astern.

He was still impelled to turn and follow its path, although he had miles to search before he logically should. He weighed his gut-feeling against common sense. He could simply not decide unless he knew when she had gone. It was too soon to turn without a reason. The only documentary evidence, the logbook, seemed nowhere.

He had awakened her at midnight, to stand her watch. He had finished his own stint with a last sweep of the horizon, gone below, and shaken her shoulder. He had not even bothered to kiss her awake, as he used to do before Jean-Paul, but he must not think of that now.

She had slithered from her bunk and stumbled to the stove for the cup of coffee he had poured her. He had told her to check topside for squalls every half an hour: the boat was far enough from land and steamship lanes so that she could sleep in the intervals. She would set her kitchen timer to wake up for her sweeps, but unlike him, she would not really need it. She was too conscientious to sleep deeply on watch.

Then he had crawled into his bunk. The last heart-grabbing words to the woman he loved were par for the recent course: “Every time you go topside, log the speed.”

His eyes went blind again with tears. He clenched the shroud and tried to see into the rising sun. “Christ,” he mumbled, half-strangled: “Holy Jumping Jesus Christ!”

He had to quit sniveling if he was going to see at all. He tried to focus his mind on the facts that would help find her, to estimate her drift and his and the difference between them, and how to handle it, but his brain refused to compute unless it knew when it had happened.