Page 60 of Presumed Dead

Then Ethan sat with the other thing Greg had left behind, which wasn’t warm at all.

Greg had clocked the Bertram. So had Catherine. So had Roy. So had Sloane. Four people on this dock had looked at Doyle Pruitt running his boat through a storm and known in their bones that it was wrong, and not one of them could say why, and the not-being-able-to-say-why was the exact gap the network had been living in for years. Decent people noticing and having nowhere to put it.

He had somewhere to put it now.

He texted Caleb the gist and went to wash Greg’s coffee cup.

By noon he had primed the last of the rail and run out of reasons to stay on the boat, and he found himself thinking about whether she had eaten.

It was a ridiculous thing to think about. She was a grown woman who had run a marina by herself for years and had fed herself every one of those days without his help. But he’d watched her work through lunch yesterday, and he’d watched her eat crackers at her counter the day before, and the thought of her standing at that counter again with a sleeve of saltines and a marina to run had gotten under his skin and stayed there.

So he made two sandwiches.

He had good bread, because he’d bought good bread in town like a man who intended to live somewhere, and he had the leftover grouper from George’s charter, and he made two grouper sandwiches with too much of everything the way Catherine would approve of, and he wrapped them in the wax paper he’d bought for no reason he’d been willing to name at the time, and he carried them across the parking lot to the office.

She was at the counter with the daybook open and a pen in her hand and, he saw, a sleeve of saltines at her elbow.

He set the wax paper bundle on the counter between them.

“What’s this?”

“Lunch.”

She looked at the bundle. She looked at him. The pen stopped moving.

“Lunch?”

“It’s grouper. From George’s trip. I had extra bread.”

That last part wasn’t quite a lie and wasn’t quite the truth, and she heard the gap in it, and something moved at the corner of her mouth that wasn’t a smile but was thinking about becoming one.

“You made me lunch.”

“I made two sandwiches. One of them is yours. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“There has to be,” he said, “or I’m a man who walked across a parking lot to bring a woman a sandwich, and I’m not ready to be that man in front of George Halsey.”

She laughed.

It startled both of them. It was a real laugh, short and surprised, the laugh of a woman who hadn’t expected to laugh today, and it changed her whole face for the second it lasted, and Ethan stood at her counter and watched it happen and felt it go through him like warmth through cold hands.

He wanted, with a suddenness that nearly took his breath, to reach across the counter and put his hand against the side of her face.

He didn’t.

He put his hands flat on the counter instead, which was where her hands already were, close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off her skin, not close enough to touch, and she looked down at the four hands on the counter and didn’t move hers away.

They stood like that for a moment longer than two people stood at a counter about a sandwich.

“Eat with me,” she said.

It wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t quite an invitation either. It was something braver than both, a woman opening a door she’d kept shut a long time, and he heard exactly what it cost her to say it.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that.”

She locked the register and flipped the little clock sign to BACK IN 30, and they sat on the weathered bench her father had built into the rail outside the office door, and they ate grouper sandwiches in the sun and watched the boats, and for a while neither of them said anything that mattered, which was its own kind of luxury.