Page 53 of Presumed Dead

It was part of it now.

He stood up, put on a clean shirt, drank a full glass of water, and walked across the parking lot at five twenty-six with the folded page in his back pocket and the answer in his head and the small unfamiliar weight in his chest of being about to tell a woman the first true thing he had told anyone outside Shadow Ops in three years.

The kiosk light was on.

He opened the side door of the office.

Chapter Nine

Sloane closed the daybook at five twenty-four and put the pen across the center seam.

She’d been closing the daybook at six o’clock most nights since her father died. Tonight she’d closed it at five twenty-four because the man who’d told her this afternoon he’d be at her office at five-thirty was a man she had no intention of meeting across an open daybook.

She wiped the coffee pot, moved the till to the safe, and unlocked the side door — he’d come in the side door this morning, and the side door was the door she’d unlocked for him without having to say so — and she left it cracked the inch he’d need to push it open without knocking.

Then she sat down on the stool behind the front counter and put both hands flat on the wood and waited.

The kiosk light was on. The marina outside was quiet at five twenty-five, with the captains on Pier One done with their afternoon and most of the boats at canvas, and the sun moving down toward the Gulf at the slow gold angle of a late May afternoon, and somewhere on Pier Two Catherine was on her deck with her paperback and the sun in her face.

Sloane had been holding the lie in her head and her notebook for ten hours and forty-seven minutes.

She’d put her notebook on the shelf at six forty-one this morning and she hadn’t taken it off. She’d worked through the morning, eaten crackers at her counter at noon, and set a new cleat at slip ten by herself this afternoon with a man she’d been thinking about since six thirty-two on Tuesday morning bringing her a cup of coffee at two-forty. The lie had stayed on her mind through all of it.

She was going to get it out of her head in about ninety seconds.

The side door opened at five twenty-six.

Ethan came in with a folded page in his back pocket and a clean shirt on and his hair combed back from his face, and he closed the side door behind him with a careful quiet, and he stopped at the front of the counter.

He didn’t sit. There was a stool on his side. He didn’t take it.

“Hey.”

“Hi.”

“I’m going to give you the answer. Then I’m going to stop talking and let you ask whatever you want to ask.”

“Okay.”

“I’m a special operative.”

Sloane didn’t move.

“I’ve been on a maritime investigation for eight months. The marina is on the route. Doyle Pruitt is a person of interest. He isn’t the principal. There’s a network, and the network runs transport through here, but also in other ways outside of here. This is one part of it.”

She felt the words land.

Her chest felt heavy and her heart beat faster. At first her mind was blank, absorbing the news. She had felt on some level he wasn't who he said he was. She didn't expect this.

She kept her face still.

“Go on.”

“I can’t name the principal yet. We’ll be there in two or three weeks. There’s a piece of the file I can’t share with you for those two weeks. The piece isn’t about your marina and isn’t about Doyle, and I’ll give it to you when I can.”

She watched his face.

Whatever the piece was, it was sitting in his face as the lie was sitting in hers, and she could see the weight of it. She didn’t ask. He’d told her there was a piece he couldn’t give her, and the not-asking was the first thing she could give him back. But she wanted to. Her heart beat so hard she wondered if he could see her body move with every beat. Her breathing was hard to even out. Through it all, she managed to say, “Go on.”