Page 50 of Presumed Dead

She had a clipboard, checking the fuel pump that had taken the storm at the head of Pier One. He didn’t come up off the swim platform, didn’t wave, let her work. She finished at twelve twenty-two and went back into the office, and the kiosk light came on at twelve twenty-four, which meant she was reading something at her counter, which meant she was probably eating lunch.

He primed the second coat at twelve thirty-five.

At one o’clock Greg Bonner came over from Reel Therapy with a bilge pump in his hand.

“Vale.”

“Greg.”

“Don’s pump.”

“Don’s pump?”

“I told Don in 2018 he needed to replace it. He didn’t. He told me he’d get to it. He didn’t. Now he’s dead and the pump is your problem and you’re the new owner, so.”

“So.”

“Take the spare. I’ve had it on my shelf for six years. I’m not going to live long enough to need a spare bilge pump. You will.”

“Greg.”

“Take it.”

Ethan took it. Greg sat on the gunwale and ran him through the install for twenty minutes, with the kind of patience an older man had for a younger man who was being given an heirloom, and Ethan asked the questions of a man who knew what he was being given and was paying attention to the gift.

At one twenty-eight, Greg tipped two fingers and went back to Reel Therapy.

Ethan put the pump on the dinette and washed his hands and stood at the cabin port and looked across at the office.

The kiosk light was still on.

At two-forty he made two cups of coffee.

He didn’t make them in the office pot. He made them on the small two-burner stove in the cabin, which produced better coffee than the office machine, and he poured both cups into the travel mugs he’d bought in Jacksonville two weeks ago, and he didn’t ask himself why he’d bought two travel mugs for a man who lived alone on a boat.

He carried them up the cabin steps and across the boardwalk and onto Pier Two.

Sloane was at the head of Pier Two on her hands and knees with the loose cleat from slip ten beside her and a fresh bag of marine sealant in her left hand and a cordless drill on the planking next to her right knee, and she was setting a new cleat into the planking by herself at two forty-one on a Thursday afternoon, and the left knee she’d gone down on at four-something this morning was the knee she had on the planking now.

She heard him coming. She didn’t look up.

“I’m working.”

“I brought coffee.”

She set the drill down and looked up.

She had a smudge of marine sealant on the side of her jaw where she’d brushed her face with her wrist, and her hair was tied back the way she’d tied it back in the rain at five this morning, and her eyes had the kind of tiredness a woman had at two forty-one in the afternoon after she’d been up since four-oh-six and had worked the storm and had been holding a question in her chest since six twenty-eight, and the eyes didn’t move off his face.

He held out a mug.

She took it.

She didn’t say thank you. The not-saying-thank-you was an honesty between them, because they had already done the thank-you at six twenty-eight at the head of slip nine, and they had already done the you-didn’t-ask-me-to and the I-didn’t-have-to, and what was between them now was a different thing.

She drank.

He drank.