Kade alone is smaller than Kade with a ledger for a shield.

You stand in the office with the chest closed and the key visible, which is a kind of honesty. You offer Pip’s plan without an audience: closed tide, skin home, after-storm shares, fog-lane watches that put coin in the mend-box instead of a bounty on a coat.

Kade stares at the window, at the bar’s white lie. “If I look weak, skippers stop listening when I close the harbor for real weather.”

“This is real weather,” you say. “Spring plus storm. Pell’s clock. Grey Stack’s scar.”

He rubs his face. Fear of wrecks. Fear of being the man who gave back salvage and then had to write a drowning. You do not mock it. Mocking fear makes it louder.

“I will listen at dusk,” he says, which might mean the bar, where people get stupid. Or, after a longer breath: “Or I will come to the Post and let them see me listen.”