Page 31 of Presumed Dead

She held it with two hands across the parking lot, because Catherine had made the casserole heavy, with too much of whatever the dish called for, and Sloane balanced it against her hip as she keyed the truck door open and slid it onto the passenger side floor, where the foot mat would hold it level.

Across the lot, slip seventeen was visible at the angle the lot offered. The cabin light was on. His companionway hatch was open the inch he left it open. A shadow of a man inside moved once and was still.

She didn’t wave.

She didn’t know whether he could see her from where he was. She suspected he could. Either way, she got in the truck, put both hands on the wheel, and sat for the count of about ten breaths.

The question that had walked up to her on Pier Three at twelve twenty-one and had not yet said its own name was sitting next to her on the bench seat, the way a passenger sat on a bench seat in an old truck, which was patiently, with both hands on its own knees, waiting for her to look at it.

She looked at it.

The question had a shape now. The shape was: she had walked Pier Three twice in twenty-eight hours to check on a man whose boat was fine, whose questions were on a written list, whose interest in her marina was politely on the page. She had walked it once for the cleat and once for the holding tank, and both times the work had been the cover, and on both walks she’d let him see, with the half-smile on her face she’d been unable to control, that the walk had not been about the work.

Doyle Pruitt had been at her counter this morning watching slip seventeen through her front window. She had registered Doyle watching it. She had not, in the five seconds it took to register Doyle watching it, considered why a man might watch the same slip she had been walking past twice a day for twenty-eight hours.

She was thinking about it now.

Doyle was a man she'd been careful with for five years. Hank Pruitt was a man she had been comfortable with for twenty. Sid Hoffman was a man she had been at ease with for two. George Halsey was a man she had stopped pretending was not her favorite tenant in 2019. Catherine was the friend who saw past her. Margo was the friend who saw through her. There were eight people on this dock she had known for between two and thirty years, and there was not one of them she had been more careful with in the last twenty-eight hours than she had been with Ethan Vale.

Care was the word.

She turned the key. The engine started. She put both hands back on the wheel. She didn’t pull out of the lot for another count of three breaths because the next thing on the bench seat next to the question was the answer the question had been waiting to deliver.

She was more careful with him because what she was being careful with around him was new.

That was the answer. That was the sentence. She turned it over once, the way her father had taught her to turn a sentence over before she committed to it, and the sentence held. She’d been a woman in armor for years. The new tenant on her dock was a man she had been quietly taking the armor off in front of since six thirty-two yesterday morning, and she hadn’t been doing it on purpose, and the not-on-purpose was the part that mattered, because a woman who took armor off on purpose was a woman who was in control of the taking, and Sloane wasn’t in control.

She backed the truck out of the spot, didn’t turn on the radio, and drove home. The Pyrex moved a quarter inch against the foot mat at the first stop sign and stopped, and the casserole was fine, and the question on the bench seat had said its name, and tomorrow she would still be the woman who ran the marina, and tomorrow he would still be the man on her dock, and she didn’t know yet what she was going to do about either of them, but she knew, for the first time since the Coast Guard officer had stood on her dock with his cap in his hand four years ago, that there was something she wanted besides answers.

The wanting wasn’t small.

She drove home with both hands on the wheel and the casserole on the foot mat and the marina behind her, and she thought about a man on a swim platform with a pencil behind his ear and a binder he’d been reading for an hour and ten because he was motivated.

She thought about the green fleck.

She ate the tuna noodle casserole for dinner. It was unreasonable. She ate two helpings.

Chapter Six

Ethan saw her walk Pier Two at five forty-three.

He was at the dinette with his second cup of coffee and the curtain over the port pulled back the inch he’d pulled it back yesterday, and Sloane Mercer came past the kiosk and onto the boardwalk and down the long arm of Pier Two with the green thermos in her right hand and her shoulders set in the careful particular way of a woman who’d been walking the same dock at the same hour for four years.

She didn’t look at Pier Three.

Yesterday she hadn’t looked at Pier Three either, and yesterday he’d let himself believe the not-looking was a four-year habit. This morning, he watched her not look at Pier Three with the small attention a man paid to the difference between something a person did out of habit and something a person did on purpose, and the difference was the count of about a quarter second longer than yesterday between the kiosk and the head of the boardwalk.

She was working at not looking.

He set the coffee down.

That she was working at it was the first piece of information he’d gotten this morning, and it wasn’t yet six, and the day was going to pay out, but it had paid out something already.

She reached the end of slip eight and set the thermos on the piling. He could see her in profile from the cabin port if he held the curtain at the angle he was holding it, and he held the curtain at that angle until she’d poured the first cup and drank it, and then he let the curtain fall, because a man who watched a woman drink the second cup was a man who’d crossed a line he hadn’t earned the right to cross yet.

He drank his coffee.

The watch on his wrist said five fifty-three. He had seven minutes before she’d walk back up the dock, and he had to be doing something other than thinking about her by the time she walked back up the dock, because she wouldn’t see him from inside her own counter at six on the dot when the marina opened, but she might feel him from anywhere on the property if he wasn’t doing something.