Page 69 of Presumed Dead

“I came over here thinking I’d say more than I’ve said,” she told the water.

“What did you mean to say?”

“I don’t remember anymore. Most of it sounded sensible in my kitchen and ridiculous on the way down the pier.”

“That’s how it usually goes.”

“Is it?”

“In my limited experience.”

She turned her head and looked at him then, and the smile got a little fuller, and he could see her in the soft late light with her hair down and a flush at the side of her neck he’d put there, and he had to remind himself, deliberately and with effort, that he had a job to do and a clock running and that he could not, by any measure, ask her to stay tonight.

She seemed to know he was thinking it. Or she was thinking it herself.

“I’m going to go home,” she said. “I don’t want to. But I’m going to anyway.”

“All right.”

“Because if I stay, it’s going to be something I’m doing partly to outrun what’s coming. And I don’t want any of it to be that. When I stay, it’s going to be because I’ve decided to, with all the lights on.”

He felt that land in his chest with the small, hard thump of a sentence he was going to carry around with him for the next two weeks.

“Sloane.”

“Yes.”

“When you stay, the lights will be on.”

She laughed, just a little, the same laugh as the sandwich, the surprised one, the one he was discovering he would do almost anything to hear, and she stepped off the swim platform onto the pier with a hand on the rail and the small, careful balance of a woman who knew her way around a boat.

She walked back up Slip Seventeen and the boardwalk.

She turned once, halfway up, the way she had not turned the day she’d first walked past his slip, and looked back at him across the water and lifted her hand in a small wave that was not the wave of a marina owner to a tenant, and he raised his hand back, and she went.

He stood at the gunwale until he saw her truck lights come on across the lot, and then he stood there until the lights swung out onto Lake Road, and then he stood there a while longer with the marina dark around him and the taste of her still on his mouth and the heat of her still in his hand, and he understood with a kind of grim, grateful clarity exactly how much of himself she now had.

His phone buzzed in his pocket.

He looked at it. It was Caleb, the second time today, which was never good news, but Ethan looked at the screen and could not, in that moment, make himself feel about it the way he should have.

He let it go to voicemail.

He called Caleb back in nine minutes, after he’d sat down at his dinette and put his hands flat on the table and made himself breathe like a man instead of a man in love.

“Vale.”

“Caleb.”

“Where were you?”

“On my deck.”

A pause.

“Vale.”

“Yeah.”