Page 67 of Presumed Dead

He went below and changed into a clean shirt he didn’t need to change into, because he had nothing else to do with himself, and he sat at the dinette and tried to read, and read the same paragraph three times. There was a spot on the gunwale he cleaned that didn’t need cleaning. He thought about texting her. He didn’t.

She’d know if he texted just because. She’d been reading her own information for too long not to know.

So he sat with the want and let it be what it was, and the afternoon went slowly.

He saw her come around the corner of the office a little after seven.

The marina was quiet at that hour on a Sunday, the weekend boats gone, the long gold light going pink at the edges over the Gulf, and Sloane Mercer walked across the parking lot in a way he hadn’t seen her walk before, which was without anywhere obvious to be, in jeans and a soft gray shirt that wasn’t her work shirt, with her hair down and her hands empty.

She came down Pier Three.

He set the book he wasn’t reading face-down on the engine cover and stood, because a man who didn’t stand when Sloane Mercer walked down his pier was a man who’d misread the moment, and he hadn’t misread anything about her yet.

She stopped at the head of his slip.

She didn’t step onto the swim platform. She stood at the pylon with one hand resting on it and looked at him, and the light was on her face, and her eyes were the blue they were at this hour with the sun going, and she didn’t say anything for a count of about four breaths.

He waited. He’d learned by now that Sloane Mercer arrived in her own time.

“I’m off the clock,” she said.

“All right.”

“It’s Sunday. The marina is closed. I’m not the marina owner right now.”

“Okay.”

“I’m a woman who walked over to a man’s boat at dusk.”

She said it like she’d been practicing it on the way over, and her voice was steady, but her hand on the pylon was not, and he could see the white of her knuckles from where he stood, and the seeing of it did something to him he didn’t have words for.

“Sloane.”

“I’m not asking permission, Ethan. I’m telling you what I am tonight. You can tell me what you are.”

He looked at her.

Every careful sentence Caleb had ever taught him about asset distance and operational discipline and the difference between a friend and a file was sitting in his head in a small neat row, and every one of them was useless to him in this moment, because the woman at his pylon had walked over here by herself and named what she was doing and put it in his hands.

She’d come for him.

He thought, very briefly, about the window Caleb had named at one o’clock and the piece of file that still sat between them and the man in slip nine and the fact that he was going to have to tell her the worst sentence of her life inside two weeks, and he thought about all of it like a man thinking about weather he’d already decided to walk out in.

“I’m a man who has been waiting for you to walk over here for three days,” he said.

She let out a breath, and her hand let go of the pylon.

“Good,” she said.

She stepped onto the swim platform.

The Sundancer rocked once under her weight and steadied, the small private welcome a boat made when she accepted a person aboard, and Ethan stood on his cockpit deck with his hands at his sides and didn’t reach for her, because she had walked over here and named what she was, and she was going to be the one to close the distance, or it didn’t mean what it was supposed to mean.

She closed it.

She stepped up onto the deck and crossed the three feet of teak between them with the slow steady walk of a woman who had decided, and she stopped close enough that he could see the small lines at the corners of her eyes and the place at her temple where she’d been freckled by some long-ago summer, and she put both hands flat on the front of his shirt, and looked up.

“Hi,” she said.