Page 63 of Presumed Dead

Chapter Eleven

Sloane caught herself looking for him before she’d finished her first cup of coffee, and she didn’t like what that meant.

She’d walked out to slip eight the way she did every morning, poured her coffee, and stood at the end of the pier, and somewhere in the middle of the first cup she’d caught her eyes drifting to Pier Three, to the Sundancer, to the dark cockpit where a man was probably still asleep. She’d turned her back on it on purpose and made herself look at the water instead.

It hadn’t helped. The wanting to look was its own information, and she’d been reading her own information for a long time.

She was forty-one hours into knowing what Ethan Vale was, and she had expected the knowing to change how she felt about him, to cool it, to put a professional distance between them now that she understood he was a man with a mission, or purpose, somewhere and a job that used her dock. The knowing hadn’t cooled anything. If anything, it had done the opposite. He had stood in her office and handed her the truth, or enough of it, and he’d watched her face while he did it, and he hadn’t flinched from what she might do with it. That took a kind of nerve she’d stopped expecting from men.

And then he’d made her a sandwich.

That was the part that had kept her up. Not the investigation running through her marina. Not the man in slip nine who’d been lying to her for months. The sandwich. A man had noticed she didn’t eat and had walked across her boardwalk with grouper on good bread wrapped in wax paper, and had made a joke so he wouldn’t have to say what it meant, and she had laughed for the first time in longer than she could name.

She’d laughed.

She put her hand flat against her own sternum, where the laugh had come from, like she could still feel the place it had loosened.

Behind her, across the slip water, she heard a cabin hatch slide open. She didn’t turn around. She finished her coffee with her back to Pier Three and her heart doing something foolish, and she made herself walk back up the dock without looking, and she was proud of that, and she knew exactly how small a victory it was.

Saturday was the busy day, and she was grateful for it.

The weekend boaters came down with their coolers and their kids and their long lists of small needs, and Sloane sold ice and fuel and sundries and two new dock lines and a chart of the back bay to a man who’d been coming for six summers and still got lost every time. She pumped diesel. She talked a nervous first-time owner through backing his Bowrider off the trailer without bending the prop. She found a lost flip-flop, refereed a dispute about a borrowed gaff, and sold a child a fifty-cent gum ball with the gravity the transaction deserved.

This was the part of the work she loved and never said so. Her father had loved it the same way and never said so either. A marina on a Saturday was a hundred small kindnesses dressed up as commerce, and she was good at it, and being good at it had kept her standing through years she’d otherwise have gone under.

George Halsey ran a charter out at seven and was back by noon with four sunburned tourists and a cooler of snapper. He tipped two fingers at her as he passed the office, and she lifted her chin back, and that was a whole conversation between two people who’d known each other long enough to not need words.

Catherine came up from her houseboat around ten in a sun hat the size of a small umbrella and bought a lemonade she didn’t need as an excuse to lean on the counter.

“Busy,” Catherine said, approving.

“Saturday.”

“You look better than you looked Thursday.”

Sloane handed her the lemonade and made change. “It was a hard Thursday.”

“It was a fifty-knot Thursday.” Catherine’s pale eyes did the thing they did, the gentle disassembling look of a woman who’d been reading Sloane since Sloane was twenty-one. “And yet here you are on Saturday looking like somebody who slept.”

“I slept fine.”

“Mm,” Catherine said, and took her lemonade, and didn't say the rest of whatever she was thinking, which was its own kind of mercy and its own kind of pressure.

She paused at the door.

“He’s a good one, you know,” Catherine said, not turning around. “The tenant. Whatever he is under the part you can see. I’ve had a lot of years to learn the difference between a man who’s performing decency and a man who’s stuck with it. That one’s stuck with it.”

And she went out into the sun before Sloane could decide whether to answer, which was exactly the point of saying it that way.

Margo came by at two with a bag of cookies from the Sandbar and the specific energy of a woman who had heard something.

Sloane loved Margo and dreaded her in roughly equal measure, which was the correct way to feel about a best friend. Margo and Jace ran the Sandbar together, and between the two of them they heard everything that happened in Blossom Springs within about ninety minutes of it happening, and Margo had never once in many years let a piece of information sit when she could bring it a block down to the marina and watch Sloane’s face while she delivered it.

“I brought cookies,” Margo said, setting the bag on the counter.

“I can see that.”

“They’re the good ones. The ones with the brown butter.”