Page 75 of Presumed Dead

He’d promised her two weeks. They didn't have that long. The promise had been a true thing in the moment he’d made it, and it would be a true thing in the moment he had to break it, and the gap between those two truths was the place a man like Ronan Cross lived his whole working life. Ethan was going to learn to live in that gap whether he wanted to or not.

He came down Sunset Beach Road and crossed the marina parking lot, and Sloane was on the dock walking back from the fuel pump with a clipboard in one hand and the canvas jacket she’d worn every morning open over her shirt in the warm afternoon, and she looked up and saw him and her face did the small private lift that was the one she’d been giving him since Sunday at dusk, and he felt it in his chest and made himself smile back. He stopped in front of her and handed her the bag with the salad. "Lunch. Don't say anything, just eat it, please."

She smiled as she took the bag from him, turned and went into the marina, and he turned toward his boat and kept moving.

He went down into the cabin and sat at the dinette in the dim afternoon light and put both hands flat on the wood and breathed.

Two days.

Whatever was going to happen between now and then, he was going to do it inside the small specific window of being a man who was, finally, in love and was also, finally, about to break the heart of the woman he loved in a way she’d see coming and still, somehow, be the kind of man she could forgive on the other side of. At least he hoped that last part was true.

He didn’t know yet whether he was that kind of man, but he was going to find out.

He picked up his phone and texted Caleb three words:

Met Ronan. Copy.

Then he sat in the cabin until the light shifted on the water and the marina ticked into the early evening, and he thought about a woman with her hands flat on the front of his shirt and a kiss that had been the most honest thing he had done in three years, and he thought about what honesty was going to cost both of them, and he sat with both of those thoughts and didn't put either of them down.

Chapter Fourteen

Sloane unwrapped the salad at the office desk and found a second fork in the bag, which meant Margo had packed it, which meant Margo knew.

She set the fork down and looked at it for a while. He'd walked into the Sandbar at lunch and ordered a salad and asked Margo to wrap it for her, and Margo had put two forks in the bag like a woman leaving a note she didn't have to sign. There was no version of this town where a man bought a marina owner her lunch and the marina owner's best friend didn't have the whole thing arranged into a story by the time the bag hit the counter.

She ate it anyway. It was a good salad. He'd remembered she liked the vinaigrette on the side, which she'd mentioned exactly once, eight days ago, in the middle of a sentence about something else.

That was the thing about him she kept circling back to. He listened the way most people pretended to. He took the small true things she let slip and put them somewhere and gave them back to her later, and every time he did it, she felt the floor of her chest drop an inch, and she was running out of inches.

She'd spent years being careful. She knew the shape of careful the way she knew the marina at low tide, every soft spot, every place the bottom came up to meet you. Careful had kept her alive through the worst of it. Careful had also, somewhere in there, stopped being a thing she did and started being a thing she was, and she hadn't noticed the changeover until a man in slip seventeen made her a sandwich and she'd laughed out loud at her own dock and frightened herself with the sound.

The salad was gone. She tossed the container and missed the trash can and got up to retrieve it, and through the office window she could see the Sundancer at the head of Pier Three, and the cockpit was empty, and she stood there with the crumpled plastic in her hand longer than the moment called for.

He'd told her what he was. A man with a mission and a job that used her dock. He'd stood right there by the standing file and handed it to her and watched her face, and she'd waited for the knowing to make her sensible, and the knowing had done nothing of the kind. If anything, it had made it worse, because now she understood that whatever this was, it had a clock on it, and a clock made a person count, and counting made a person honest about what she'd regret.

She threw the container away. She made it that time.

Catherine was on her foredeck at slip six with a paperback and a glass of iced tea when Sloane came down Pier Two on the afternoon walk, and she lowered the book and watched Sloane come like she watched weather move in off the Gulf, with patience and no particular hurry to comment on it.

“You walked past slip eight without stopping,” Catherine said.

Sloane stopped. She looked back. She had, in fact, walked the length of Pier Two and gone past the empty berth at slip eight without the pause she'd built into every afternoon for four years, the half-beat where she stood at the head of it and looked at the water and let herself feel what she felt and then kept moving.

“I didn't notice,” she said.

“I know. That's what I'm telling you.” Catherine turned a page she wasn't reading. “Four years you've stopped at that slip like it was a chapel. Today you walked by it thinking about something else. I'm not saying that's good or bad. I'm saying I saw it.”

Sloane came down the dock and stood at the rail of Catherine's houseboat, and the two of them looked at the slip basin between Pier Two and Pier Three, the open stretch of green water with the Sundancer riding quietly on the far side of it.

“It scares me,” Sloane said. She hadn't planned to say it. Catherine had a way of leaving a silence open at exactly the width of the thing a person was carrying, and Sloane had walked right into it. “Not him. The other part. That I'd let myself want something this much and then have it turn out that I can't keep it.”

“That's not a reason not to want it.”

“Margo said almost the same thing.”

“Margo's smarter than she lets on.” Catherine set the book down spine-up on the deck. “Can I tell you something an old woman has earned the right to say?”

“You're going to anyway.”