‘‘And you’ve got yourself a pretty sister-in-law, the beginnings of a boatbuilding business, and this . . .’’ Ray gestured to take in the water, the bobbing floats, the tall, glossily wet eelgrass on the verge where a lone egret stood like a marble pillar. ‘‘And inside you, you’ve got something Seth needs. Patience. Maybe too much of it in some areas.’’

‘‘What’s that supposed to mean?’’

Ray sighed gustily. ‘‘There’s something you don’t have, Ethan, that you need. You’ve been waiting around and making excuses to yourself and doing not a damn thing to get it. You don’t make a move soon, you’re going to lose it again.’’

‘‘What?’’ Ethan shrugged and maneuvered the boat to the next float. ‘‘I’ve got everything I need, and what I want.’’

‘‘Don’t ask yourself what, ask yourself who.’’ Ray clucked his tongue, then gave his son a quick shoulder shake. ‘‘Wake up, Ethan.’’

And he had awakened, with the odd sensation of that big, familiar hand on his shoulder.

But, he thought as he brooded over his first cup of coffee, he still didn’t have the answers.

ONE

‘‘ GOT US SOME NICE peelers here, cap’n.’’ Jim Bodine culled crabs from the pot, tossing the marketable catch in the tank. He didn’t mind the snapping claws—and had the scars on his thick hands to prove it. He wore the traditional gloves of his profession, but as any waterman could tell you, they wore out quick. And if there was a hole in them, by God, a crab would find it.

He worked steadily, his legs braced wide for balance on the rocking boat, his dark eyes squinting in a face weathered with age and sun and living. He might have been taken for fifty or eighty, and Jim didn’t much care which end you stuck him in.

He always called Ethan Cap’n, and rarely said more than one declarative sentence at a time.

Ethan altered course toward the next pot, his right hand nudging the steering stick that most waterman used rather than a wheel. At the same time, he operated the throttle and gear levels with his left. There were constant small adjustments to be made with every foot of progress up the line of traps.

The Chesapeake Bay could be generous when she chose, but she liked to be tricky and make you work for her bounty.

Ethan knew the Bay as well as he knew himself. Often he thought he knew it better—the fickle moods and movements of the continent’s largest estuary. For two hundred miles it flowed from north to south, yet it measured only four miles across where it brushed by Annapolis and thirty at the mouth of the Potomac River. St. Christopher’s sat snug on Maryland’s southern Eastern Shore, depending on its generosity, cursing it for its caprices.