Something vaguely like humor flashed in his expression. "It has a good view of your courtyard from the back window. I pretended I was contemplating the perils of fatherhood."
Suddenly—unwillingly—Annie could see him as a father, a dirty-faced toddler on his shoulders. She shook off the image. "Well, I'm glad you suffered."
He laughed. "I'll bet you are." He rubbed a hand across his stubbled jaw, and she could see how tired he was. "You look done in, Annie. Chasing over hill and dale after me doesn't agree with you. Why don't you come inside and have a glass of iced tea?"
"Chasing after you feels just fine," she said airily, then, seeing the amused look on his face, realized what she'd said. She groaned. "I meant—"
"I know what you meant." He grinned and stood to one side, motioning her in. "After you, Annie."
Gathering her remaining shreds of dignity, she breezed up the steps, shot past him, and entered his house. The interior was cool and still and shaded, all wood and neutral colors. Across the main room, the world seemed to drop straight off into the blue waters of the bay, sparkling and glistening in the last of the afternoon sun. In a sitting area off to her right, an Audubon print of a peregrine falcon hung over a huge stone fireplace. Further to her right, on the short wall at the end of the room, nautical maps had been perfunctorily tacked into every inch available. A chest in the corner next to the french doors held a small telescope and a half-dozen pairs of binoculars.
"I'll get the tea," Garvin said, withdrawing through a doorway off the dining end of the room, where a large table of polished, gleaming cherry looked unused.
Still tense, uncertain she shouldn't have just jumped back in her car and gone home, Annie unfisted her hands and shook her fingers, trying to work blood back into them. "You're tense," she muttered to herself. "Tense, tense, tense."
She wandered across the room and examined the wall of maps. The daughter of a seaman and former director of a maritime museum, she could find her way around a nautical map. These, it seemed, were all of San Francisco Bay and the surrounding waters.
Garvin materialized beside her, handing her a tall glass of iced tea. As he took a sip of his own, he reached an arm in front of her and pointed to a spot on one of the maps. "This is where we are." He moved his hand down toward the water; she watched the muscles in his wrist, noted his scars and calluses. "This is my marina."
Annie drank some of her tea, aware of how close he was to her. "I didn't expect a real working marina."
"A lot of people don't."
"Because of your background?"
"And its location. This is a high-income area. But I'm finding a lot of boat people are like myself and don't care about the frills."
"My father was like that. He did a variety of things—fishing, lobstering, crewing—whatever work he could get that was on the water. He died at sea."
"What happened?"
Suddenly it seemed natural to tell him. "He answered a distress call. Some college kids had gone out frostbite sailing and got into trouble. While he was getting the last one aboard, he went into the water himself and was lost. He had hypothermia. He couldn't hang on."
"I'm sorry."
"My mother said he'd never have been able to live with himself if he didn't do what he could to save those kids' lives."
"Did she blame them for what happened?"
Annie shook her head, remembering her mother telling her the story, trying to make the man she'd loved real to his daughter. "They shouldn't have gone out that day. They didn't know how to handle such conditions, but they didn't know what would happen. My father could have waited for the Coast Guard to get there. If he had, all three boys would probably have died of exposure. So he minimized the risks and did what he felt he had to do."
"And your mother understood that," Garvin said quietly.
"Yes."
"The boys?"
"They were from Boston. They're grown men now, of course. Long before I became director of the local maritime museum, they funded a new wing dedicated to my father's memory. They've had to live with the consequences of that day, just as I have."
"You've a forgiving nature, Annie Payne."
"They made a mistake that day, but there are those who said my father made a mistake, too. That he should have remembered he had a wife and infant daughter at home." She drank more of her tea, trying to put into words something she'd never tried to explain to anyone before, not even Gran. "But I think he did remember, and that's why he did what he did."
Garvin stared at her a moment, then nodded slowly. "He owed it to you both to do the right thing."
"If you want right done by you," she said, "you have to do right by others."
He turned to his wall of maps. "It's complicated, knowing what's right."
"Sometimes. Not always."
"Not on that day?"