Page 71 of Presumed Dead

That Ethan had been on the phone Sunday night sounding different. That a woman on the marina had walked over to his boat at dusk.

Ronan wouldn't say it out loud. Ronan never said it out loud. He would look at him across a basket of fries, and Ethan would feel the weight of it in the room without a word being spoken, because that was how Ronan Cross delivered the harder half of every conversation he had ever been part of.

Ethan accepted that. It was the cost. He’d known it would be a cost the moment he’d let her step onto his swim platform, and he wasn't going to flinch from it now.

He primed a rail he’d already primed and watched Doyle Pruitt turn a page of his newspaper.

Doyle hadn't been off his boat all morning. Doyle had been on his boat since Saturday afternoon, with the small uneasy stillness of a man waiting for something to land. Ethan had watched him for a count of about an hour from the gunwale on Sunday and seen exactly what he was seeing now, which was a man who’d had a story rejected somewhere upstream and was waiting to find out what the rejection was going to cost him.

The principal had moved twelve million on Friday. Doyle had stopped getting calls.

Whatever Ronan was bringing to lunch, it was the next piece of that picture, and the picture was getting clearer in a way that meant a working dock was about to become a different kind of place.

At eleven-thirty, she crossed the boardwalk with a roll of receipt paper in her hand and a question on her face she’d clearly been carrying since the morning.

He came up off the swim platform when he saw her coming. He didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t been watching for her, and she didn’t bother pretending she hadn’t come.

She stopped at the head of his slip, without stepping onto the pier.

“I need to talk to you for a minute,” she said. “Not about anything serious. Just for a minute.”

“All right.”

“Not on the boat.”

“Okay.”

He stepped off onto the pier, and they walked back up the slip together at her pace, which was the marina-owner pace, slow and observant, and they didn’t touch, and they didn’t talk until they were past Catherine’s deck and back on the broad boardwalk where the angles were public and visible and nobody could read anything off them they shouldn’t be reading.

“Two things,” she said, looking at the water and not at him.

“Two things, okay.”

“One. I’m all right today. Better than all right. I want you to know that, because I don’t want last night to land in your head as something either of us is supposed to be carefully managing the morning after.”

“Okay.”

“I’m saying it because I was up at three in the morning telling my ceiling I was all right, and I figured the ceiling didn’t need to hear it as much as you did. There. That’s one.”

He felt a smile move at the corner of his mouth before he could stop it. He let it.

“Two,” she said.

“Two.”

She turned and looked at him then, and the gold light was on the side of her face, and her eyes were the steady blue they got when she was about to say a hard sentence.

“Whatever is coming,” she said, “I’d like you to remember that I knew it was coming, and I kissed you anyway. That goes both ways, Ethan. Not just yours. Mine too.”

He didn’t answer for a moment, because the answer that wanted to come up was the answer a man didn't say on an open boardwalk at eleven-thirty in the morning, and he had to put it back down where it lived and find a smaller one.

“I’ll remember,” he said.

“Good.”

She held his eyes for another beat, and then she nodded once and walked back to the office, and he stood on the boardwalk and watched her go and understood with a clarity that surprised him how much he was going to do to deserve what she’d just said, because what he still hadn't told her and he needed to when he could, would change her life.

He went back to his boat and got cleaned up for the Sandbar.