My sister grabbed my work bag off a pier and threw it in the river in front of twenty sailors. She thought I’d come to embarrass her. She didn’t know I was the commander running the inspection.

I want to record that I noticed that at the time.

I noticed it, and I filed it, and I did nothing with it, because I was busy being spoken to.

That is the single operational failure of my morning and I have written it up as one.

A stranger arrives inside a controlled area, at the exact hour of an unannounced inspection, citing an event that does not exist and a name I have never heard, and tells me — out loud, in front of witnesses — that a third party predicted my movements.

Wendell told me you’d try something like this.

If a contractor’s wife had said that to any other officer on that pier, they would have had her escorted off and then spent the afternoon finding out who Wendell was.

I heard my sister’s voice and stopped being an inspector.

Eleven weeks of work, and the thing that took me offline was a woman saying my name in the tone she has used since 1996.

But she had already decided why I was standing on that pier.

In her version, I had found out where she was working and driven forty minutes to stand on a jetty in a costume to spoil her morning.

I said, quietly: I’m working. I need you to leave now.

She laughed.

She said: working. Working in your little outfit with your little clipboard in front of my clients.

And then she said it loud enough for every single person on that pier:

You couldn’t let me have one day. You couldn’t stay in your lane.

Kettleman took half a step forward.

He has fourteen years on me and about nine inches, and he did not say anything, he just moved his weight, which on a pier is a sentence.

I gave him a small shake of the head.

Not yet.

She is my sister. I still thought I could handle it.

There was a moment in there, about halfway, that I have not been able to put down.

She looked at the crates. At the tape. At the two contractors who had stopped working and were standing there with their arms folded.

And something crossed her face that was not anger.

She had realised she was in the wrong place. Not that she was wrong — that she was standing somewhere she was not supposed to be, in heels, in front of people, with no exit that did not look like retreating.