Page 77 of Presumed Dead

She was afraid of how much she wanted it. That was different. She was beginning to understand it was the better fear.

Outside, the first edge of the system was still a day off the coast, and the night was warm and still and gave no sign of what was coming. She sat in it a while longer, in the good quiet of a decision made, and then she went to bed, and for once she didn't lie awake listening for a boat that wasn't going to come in. She slept.

Chapter Fifteen

Ethan had four fenders rigged down the outboard side of a Grady-White at slip fourteen before the first real gust came through and told him the forecast had been honest.

It came off the southwest the way the radio had promised, a long shoving push that laid the halyards over against the masts up at the sailboat end and set every loose line on the docks talking at once. He worked through it, hitching fenders at the waterline where they'd do some good, adjusting spring lines, taking up the slack that a day and a half of surge would otherwise turn into chafe. The boats whose owners lived two counties away didn't know they had a man looking after them tonight, and that suited him. A man who looked after other people's boats in a building wind was a man nobody questioned being out on the docks after dark.

Across the basin, Sloane worked the inboard side of Pier Two, and they'd fallen into the rhythm of two people who knew the same job without needing to discuss it. She took a boat; he took a boat. She called a slip number across the water, and he answered with the next one down. The wind ate half the words, and they filled in the rest from long practice neither of them actually had with each other, and somehow had anyway.

He clocked slip nine on the way past it. He didn't break stride. A man rigging storm lines looked at every boat on the dock, and the Bertram got the same half-second of attention as the Grady and the houseboat and the charter boat, no more, because more would have been a tell.

Doyle Pruitt was in his cockpit with the cabin light on behind him, not rigging anything. His fenders were where they'd been Tuesday. His spring lines hadn't been touched. A boatman who'd spent his life on the water was sitting through the front edge of a day-and-a-half blow without putting out a single extra line, which meant Doyle Pruitt was not planning to be tied to this dock long enough for chafe to matter.

Ethan filed it without slowing and moved to the next boat. Caleb would have it off the camera angle inside the hour, and there was nothing to do with it tonight but see it. The window was eight days at the outside, and Doyle's untouched cleats had just shaved a guess off the front of that, and the part of Ethan that ran the math noted the shave and kept it ready and stepped back, because the rest of the evening was not the math's to have.

He looked up and found Sloane watching him from across the green water, a coil of line over her shoulder and the wind pushing her hair across her face, and she lifted her chin at the last two boats on her side, a question, and he held up five fingers, and she nodded and bent back to the work. Whatever he'd seen at slip nine went into the locked part of him where it lived, and he gave the rest of himself to the docks and the wind and the woman across the basin, and he was getting better at the handoff than he wanted to admit, because it was good practice for a man who was going to spend the next eight days doing exactly this.

Her house sat on the east side of the inlet where the land came up just enough to hold three rooms above the water, and by the time he'd showered the salt off and driven over, the rain had started in earnest, coming sideways in the headlights, drumming the truck roof in the gravel drive.

She opened the door before he knocked. The light behind her was low and yellow and the kitchen smelled like something with garlic in it, she'd changed out of the marina clothes into a soft gray shirt and jeans, her hair was down, still damp at the ends, and she stood in the doorway with the rain coming down behind him and looked at him for a beat before she stepped back to let him in.

“You found it,” she said.

“You gave good directions.”

“I gave you a mailbox and a turn. You found it.” She shut the door against the wind, and the room got quieter. “Sit. It's almost done. I made too much because I don't know how to make a little of anything, so you're going to eat like you mean it.”

He sat at the small table set for two and watched her move around the kitchen, and the watching pulled something tight in his chest, because he'd spent three years in rooms that were never his, eating off other people's docks under other men's names, and this was a woman cooking him dinner in a house she'd grown up in, and the ordinariness of it landed harder than anything dangerous he'd done in those three years.

She put a plate in front of him, chicken and rice and something green she'd done with lemon, and she sat across with her own, and outside the wind threw a sheet of rain against the window hard enough to rattle it, and neither of them flinched, because they'd both spent the day getting ready for exactly this and there was a quiet satisfaction in being indoors and dry while it arrived.

“This is good,” he said, and meant it.

“Don't sound so surprised.”

“I'm not surprised. I'm grateful. There's a difference.”

She looked at him across the table with the fork halfway up. “You do that,” she said. “You take a thing somebody says light, and you answer it true. It throws me every time.”

“Is that a complaint?”

“No.” She set the fork down. “It's the opposite of a complaint. I'm trying to tell you I noticed, and that I don't have a lot of practice telling a man I noticed something about him, so it's coming out sideways.”

The rain kept on. Somewhere off toward the Gulf, the thunder was still distant, more pressure than sound. He put his fork down too.

“Sloane.”

“Don't.” She said it gently, with a small lift at the corner of her mouth. “Whatever careful thing you're about to say, about the clock, or the piece you're still holding, or the part where this is complicated. I know all of it. I've known it the whole time. I invited you to dinner anyway, and I didn't put an exit in the invitation, and I did that on purpose. So don't hand me the exit now. I'm asking you not to.”

He looked at her for a long moment. The thing he was holding sat in him where it always sat, heavier tonight for the lamplight and the rain and the second plate, and he understood with total clarity that the honest move and the kind move were not the same move tonight, and that she had just asked him, knowing more than she could name and less than she deserved, to choose the one that let them have this.

He chose it. He'd answer for the cost when the cost came due. Tonight she'd asked him to stay inside the small lit room with her, and he was done finding reasons not to.

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay?”