Page 66 of Presumed Dead

She typed it again. She sent it that time.

Goodnight, Ethan.

Then she set the phone face-down on the counter, and she stood in the dark a moment longer with both hands flat on the cool tile, and she let herself, just once, in her own kitchen where no one could see it, smile all the way.

Tomorrow she would be the marina owner again. Tomorrow there would be the mission and the man in slip nine and the careful distance the work required.

Tonight there was a text on her counter from a man who’d made her a sandwich, and a few inches of warm air she hadn’t closed but was going to, and the unfamiliar, terrifying, long-forgotten feeling of having something to look forward to.

She went to bed thinking about the green fleck in his eye.

Chapter Twelve

Ethan reread her text three times before he got out of bed.

Goodnight, Ethan. Two words, sent at nine seventeen the night before, and he had looked at the screen of his phone like a man looking at a small lit window across a dark field, trying to make out who was inside.

He told himself it was a goodnight. He told himself she’d typed it because polite people typed goodnight. But he told himself a lot of things he didn’t believe before he made coffee and carried it to the cockpit and stood at the gunwale waiting for her morning walk down Pier Two.

She didn’t come.

It was Sunday, which she didn’t open the marina for, which he had not realized until he’d been standing on his cockpit deck for forty minutes with cold coffee and a chest that had started doing something undignified at the sight of her every morning and now had no place to put itself. The dock stayed empty. The kiosk light stayed off. The Sundays of Sloane Mercer were apparently not his to know yet.

He went below and shaved.

He hadn’t shaved yesterday, hadn’t shaved the day before that either. He stood in front of the small mirror with a razor in his hand and looked at himself, and he tried to remember the last time he’d shaved because a woman might see him, and he couldn’t, and the not-remembering was its own answer.

He shaved.

Caleb called at one to give him news that wasn’t news yet, and Ethan was grateful for the company of his own voice on the line.

“The principal moved money on Friday,” Caleb said. “Twelve point three million through a chain of three shells. Forensics has it.”

“Friday.”

“Same day the Bertram ran the storm.”

“He’s clearing the books.”

“The shape of it says he’s expecting to be exposed, and he’s moving cash into accounts he can reach from somewhere he can run to. Which means we’re inside the window.”

“How long a window?”

“Hard to say. Ten days. Two weeks. Could be three if he’s patient. Could be eight if he panics.”

Ethan watched the water for a long count of breaths.

“Vale.”

“I’m here.”

“You’re going to have to give her the rest of it inside the window. The two weeks you promised her may not survive the timeline.”

“I know.”

“I’m sorry, brother.”

The line went dead, and Ethan stood with the phone in his hand and the afternoon sun on the back of his neck, and the part of him that had spent the morning thinking about Sloane Mercer in his kitchen on a Sunday felt like a man who’d been told the ground he was standing on was on a clock.