Page 11 of Presumed Dead

He had braced for the handshake on the drive. The handshake would be the moment he had to manage hardest, he had told himself, and he had run through it in his head with each of the variables he could imagine — what she might say, what he might feel, what he was going to do with his face when his fingers closed around hers.

None of the variables had included the warmth.

Her palm was warm and a little rough — the palm of a woman who pulled lines and bent rope and fixed her own fuel pumps. The grip was firm without being a performance. She held his hand for the length of a handshake and a half-second longer, the way a woman held a stranger’s hand when she was paying attention to who the stranger was, and the half-second moved through him like a low current.

“Welcome to the marina.”

“Thank you. It’s good to be back.”

Back.

He registered the word the moment it was out of his mouth. The decision to use it had been made on the drive. The wedding was the cover, and the wedding was the truth, and any version of Ethan Vale who came into this town pretending he had never seen it before was a version that would break the first time a regular at the bait shop recognized him from four Aprils ago. Back was the smaller risk. He had decided it on the drive, and he had said it on schedule, and Sloane Mercer’s face had moved a sixteenth of an inch in a direction that told him she had also heard the word.

She didn't call him on it.

She let her hand come out of his, and she picked up the manila folder from the counter, and said, in the level customer-service voice of a woman who was choosing to file a thing and come back to it, “Let’s get you settled. The boat’s waiting.”

“Lead the way.”

She led him out the side door of the office and onto the boardwalk, and Ethan followed half a stride behind her, and what he had to do for the next forty seconds was not look at Pier Two.

Pier Two was on his right as they walked. It ran out toward the channel at an angle that put slip eight at the far end, and the far end was where he had stood with Noah Mercer four Aprils ago on a Tuesday afternoon and signed the form that had ended the conversation he had been ten months too slow to understand. The dock had not changed. The cleats had not changed. He could see, from the angle of the boardwalk, the rough position of the cleat at the head of slip eight where Sloane stood every morning at five forty-five with a thermos and waited for a brother who was not coming back.

He didn't look.

He looked at her back instead — the line of her shoulders under the denim shirt, unhurried, the dark honey of her hair where the morning sun had begun to take the cool light out of it — and he followed her toward Pier Three.

“Office hours are seven to six, Monday through Saturday,” she said without turning. “Sunday I’m here from nine to noon. After hours, you can reach me at the number on your contract. Fuel pump is at the head of Pier One — I’ll show you. Pump-out station is at the head of Pier One also, you’ll need a code, I’ll write it down for you. Trash goes in the bin behind the office, recycling next to it, no glass overboard, no fish-cleaning at the slip — there’s a station behind the building if you want it. Wi-Fi is the marina network; password is on the back of your slip card. Cell signal is hit-or-miss in slip seventeen because of the building. You’ll want a hotspot if you’re going to be working out here.”

“Working?”

“On the boat. Whatever the boat’s making you do today.”

“Right.”

“Most of my long-term tenants make the boat into something between a project and a hobby and a religion within about six weeks. I’m going to assume you’re going to be one of them and pretend to be surprised when you start showing up with primer.”

“That seems efficient.”

“I run an efficient marina.”

She said it dryly. There was something in the way she said it — small, wry, the line of a woman who had been running a place by herself for a long time and had her own jokes about it — and Ethan registered, walking behind her on a sun-warm boardwalk in a town he had been turning over in his head for eight months, that all of David Mien’s surveillance recordings had caught Sloane Mercer at her tightest. He had been profiling a woman in armor. The woman walking ahead of him had taken some of the armor off because she was on her own dock with her hands full, and her body knew what it was doing without consulting her.

He filed that. Caleb would hear it tonight. What carrying it back to Caleb was going to cost him was not a thing he was yet ready to think about.

She turned right at the end of the boardwalk and onto Pier Three. Slip seventeen was the first slip on the pier, closest to the building, and the Sea Ray was tied up in it. She looked sad, if a boat could look sad, like nobody had loved her for a long time.

Ethan stopped walking.

Stopping had not been the plan. The plan had been to keep pace with Sloane and listen to her tell him about the slip and make a small, dry comment about what he had gotten himself into. Instead, his feet had stopped at the cleat at the head of the slip, and he was looking at the boat, and he was, in spite of every operational instinct he had, surprised.

She was bigger than the photographs had made her look.

The photographs had been taken in dim afternoon light from the dock side. They had captured the chipped paint, the faded canvas, and the tarnished hardware. They had not captured the shape of her — the long, low, confident shape of a forty-two-foot Sea Ray Sundancer built in nineteen ninety-eight by a company that knew what it was doing. Under the chipping paint was a good boat. Anybody who knew how to look could see it.

Ethan knew how to look.

He set the duffel down on the planking and the paper bag from Mae’s on top of the duffel. The walk to the gunwale took three steps. His hand went flat on the toe rail, and for a moment he stood there, looking at her.