I took a breath of the sharp Atlantic air — salt and diesel and open water and, under it, the plain unburdened feeling of a harbor with nothing behind me anymore that I had to carry.

I thought, for a moment, about how the whole afternoon would look told back to me: the drink, the shove, the siren, the papers, the great white boat shrinking behind us.

It made a good story.

But it was not, I realized, the part I would keep.

The part I would keep was smaller and had happened much earlier — the door closing quietly inside me when a man asked me to go below deck so I would stop upsetting his mother.

Everything after that had only been paperwork.