Page 81 of Presumed Dead

Sloane was coiling a last length of line at the head of Pier Two when Ethan came down the dock toward her, and he didn't pretend to have a reason this time, didn't carry a tool or angle for a boat, just walked down the pier in the dying mist and stopped close to her, closer than the dock required, and the day had emptied the marina down to the two of them and Catherine's far-off cabin light, and for a minute neither of them said anything.

“Long day,” he said.

“Good day.” She finished the coil and hung it. “Wet, but good. The boats all held. Nobody sank. I had soup with my best friend and lied to her about half of it and told her the truth about the half that matters.”

“Which half matters?”

“The half with you in it.” She said it simply, looking at the water, and then made herself look at him when she said the rest, because she'd decided last night she was done saying the true things to the floor. “I don't know how much time this has, Ethan. Yours or mine or the thing you're holding. I've stopped pretending I don't feel the clock. But I had today. I had this morning, and I had this whole strange good day knowing you'd be down here, and whatever happens when your friend Graham gets to town, and the rest of it comes, I had today. Nobody gets to take today.”

He looked at her for a long moment in the mist with something working behind his face that she couldn't fully read, and she'd come to understand that the things he couldn't say lived right there, just behind his eyes, pressing, and that the cost of whatever he was carrying was written in the muscle around them even when the words never came.

“No,” he said finally, low. “Nobody gets to take today.”

He reached out and tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear, his thumb tracing the line of her jaw, and the gesture was so unhurried, so unguarded out here in the open where anybody could have seen, that it undid her more than the night before had, because the night before had been the storm and the wanting, and this was a man touching her face on her own dock in the gray light because he wanted to and didn't care who saw.

“Come home with me,” she said. “Or I'll come to the boat. I don't care which. I'm just not done with today yet.”

“The boat,” he said. “You cooked. It's my turn, and I make a passable grilled cheese for a man who lives on one burner.”

“Sell it harder.”

“Good bread. Real butter. I'll open the good window so you can hear the water.”

“Sold.”

She gathered the last of her gear and they walked up the dock together, not touching, the marina dark and dripping and quiet around them, and across the basin the buttoned-up Bertram at slip nine sat with no light showing, and she clocked it the way she clocked everything on her dock, a half-second of attention and no more, and then she let it go and walked toward the boat and the man and the rest of the evening she'd decided to keep.

Chapter Seventeen

Ethan came up into the cockpit at first light with two coffees and found the marina washed clean, the storm gone north overnight and left the water flat and pale and the air rinsed down to nothing.

Sloane was still below, asleep in his berth with the sheet pushed down and one arm thrown across the place he'd been, and he stood at the gunwale a minute with both mugs going cold and let himself have the fact of her there. Two nights now. The grilled cheese had been better than it had any right to be, and they'd eaten it with the good window open and the water talking against the hull, and she'd fallen asleep against his shoulder before he'd finished his and he'd sat there a long time not moving so as not to wake her, learning the weight of a sleeping woman against him after three years of learning the weight of nothing at all.

He'd known the cost going in. He kept knowing it. The knowing had become a low constant pressure he carried under everything else, present even now with the coffee in his hands and the woman in his bed, because every hour he didn't tell her was an hour he was choosing, and a man didn't get to call it anything but a choice once he'd made it twice.

His phone went off in his pocket. He set the mugs on the gunwale and checked it.

On the ground. Coming to you midmorning, retired-uncle cover, looking at a project boat. Brief after. —G

Graham was in town. The piece Ronan had put in motion at the Sandbar had arrived, and the arrival of Graham Holt meant the operation had stopped being lines on a whiteboard somewhere and started being something that would happen on this dock inside a number of days Ethan could now count on one hand.

He typed back, Roger. Slip 17, ask for the logistics guy. Then he stood with the cooling coffees and looked down the companionway at Sloane asleep, and the two halves of him that had not wanted to be the same man at Ronan's lunch were going to spend today being the same man with no seam showing, because Graham was about to walk onto her dock and Sloane was about to meet a piece of the machine that ran through her marina, and Ethan had to make sure she met exactly the piece he wanted her to meet and no more.

He carried the coffees below. She surfaced when he sat on the edge of the berth, blinking at him, her hair a wreck, and she looked at him and then at the light coming through the ports and made a low, unhappy sound about the hour.

“Storm's gone,” he said. “Which means your weekend boaters are coming back today, which means you've got about an hour before this place fills up.”

“You're a cruel man to say numbers at me before coffee.”

“Coffee's in your hand.”

She looked down, found the mug he'd pressed into her fingers, and made a different sound entirely. “Okay. You can stay.” She pushed up against the bulkhead and pulled the sheet around her and drank, watching him over the rim, and her eyes were doing the soft unguarded thing again, the one he'd decided was the most dangerous thing in Blossom Springs because it made him want to deserve it. “My friend Graham coming today?”

He didn't lie. He'd drawn a hard line in himself about that early, the line between the things he couldn't tell her and the things he could, and he kept the things he could on the true side of it because he was going to need every inch of true he had when the rest came due.

“Midmorning,” he said. “He's looking at a project boat. He'll come find me. You'll like him. Most people do.”

“Will I?” She studied him. “You said that carefully. Like you'd thought about whether I'd like him.”