Page 64 of Presumed Dead

“I can't pass up the good ones.”

Margo hopped up onto the stool on the customer side and propped her chin on her hand. “A little bird told me your new tenant carried his own self across the parking lot yesterday with a picnic.”

Sloane kept her face flat and rang up nothing on the register to have something to do with her hands.

“It was a sandwich.”

“A sandwich.”

“Grouper.”

“He made you a grouper sandwich.”

“He made two sandwiches. One of them was mine. There’s a difference.”

Margo sat back like she’d been handed a gift.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “There's no difference in that.”

Sloane opened her mouth and found nothing in it. Heat climbed up the back of her neck, which hadn’t happened to her in years, and Margo clocked it instantly, because Margo clocked everything.

“Margo.”

“I’m not saying anything.”

“You’re saying a great deal.”

“I’m saying,” Margo said, and the teasing went out of her voice, and what was left was the thing underneath it, which was the reason Sloane kept her around, “that I have watched you run this place by yourself for four years and turn down every decent man who ever worked up the courage, and I have never once seen you go pink at the back of your neck over a sandwich. That’s all. I’m saying that.”

Sloane looked down at the register.

“It’s complicated, Margo.”

“It’s always complicated. That’s not a reason. That’s just the weather.”

Sloane thought about everything she couldn’t say. The mission. The investigation. The man in slip nine. The piece Ethan was holding that he’d give her in two weeks. All of it sat in her chest like a held breath, and none of it was Margo’s to carry, and all of it was the actual answer to why it was complicated, and she couldn’t give a word of it away.

So she gave Margo the only true thing she could.

“I like him,” she said. “I like him more than is sensible. And I don’t know yet if I’m allowed to.”

Margo’s face softened all the way.

“Nobody’s ever allowed to, sweetheart,” she said. “You just are, or you aren’t. The allowed part you figure out after.”

She slid off the stool, leaned over the counter, and kissed Sloane once on the cheek, quick and fierce.

“Eat the cookies. Both of them are yours.”

And she was gone, the bell over the door still swinging, before Sloane could throw something at her.

He found her at the end of the day, when the Saturday rush had bled off and the light had gone long and gold across the water.

She was on Pier Two replacing the soft board at the head of slip eight, the one she’d been meaning to replace for two seasons, the one she’d gone down on in the storm. She’d finally pulled it up and was on her knees with the new board cut to length beside her, the old one gray and spongy in her hands, and she didn’t hear him come down the pier until his shadow fell across the planking.

“Need a hand?”

She looked up. He stood with the sun behind him, and she had to put a hand up to see his face, and when she did, she found him looking down at her with an expression she’d been trying not to think about since the bench.