Page 8 of Presumed Dead

“You signed your name, Sloane. With a dash. In the second email.”

“Margo —”

“I read it. Don’t look at me like that. You forwarded me the email exchange to make sure his bank routing looked right, and the second email had your name signed at the bottom with a dash in front of it, the way you sign emails to people who matter to you, and I noticed because I notice everything and you know this about me.”

“I noticed too.”

Margo went still.

That was the thing about Margo. She could talk a person under the table for an hour, but when somebody told her something true, she went still like a cat goes still in a doorway when the light changed.

“You noticed.”

“I stared at the sent folder for ten minutes wondering why I had done it.”

“And.”

“And I haven't had an answer in four days, so I've decided to stop wondering.”

“Sweet pea.”

Sloane didn't answer that. She drank her coffee. The sugar was, in fact, the perfect amount.

“Sloane.”

“Margo.”

“Whatever he turns out to be — sweet old retiree, charming weirdo, complete waste of a parking space — you are allowed.”

“Allowed what?”

“Whatever you are going to be allowed.”

The bell over the front door dinged.

The man standing in the doorway with a duffel over his shoulder and a paper bag from Mae’s in his hand had not picked the moment, but the moment had picked him.

He stood in the open door with the morning behind him and didn't step inside until he had read the room. Sloane registered the read. He took in the counter, the coffee pot, the shelves at the back, and the woman on the stool with her green scarf and her elbows on the wood, and he took it all in without performing the taking-in, which was a thing she didn't often see a man do.

Then he saw her.

The small, careful smile he gave her was the smile of a man who had not committed to anything yet. He was tall, but not in a way that announced itself. His weight rested evenly, his shoulders soft, a man who had learned somewhere to take up less room than his size suggested. A pale blue T-shirt that had seen the kind of laundering a man did when nobody else was doing his laundering. Jeans that had been put on that morning. The kind of work boots that had been work boots for a long time. His jaw had been shaved at five in the morning by a man who knew which side he had to start on. A small scar at the corner of his left eyebrow registered before she had decided to register it.

He set the duffel down without taking his eyes off her.

“I’m looking for Sloane Mercer,” he said. “I rented a slip and bought a boat here.”

His voice was warm. Lower than she had expected from a man with his particular set of shoulders. The kind of voice a person didn't put on. The kind of voice he had been carrying around his whole life.

Margo, on the stool, did not turn around. Sloane registered the not-turning. It was Margo’s way of giving her the room to be the one in the conversation.

“That’s me.” Sloane set down her cup. The cup made a small sound on the counter that she heard over the sound of his standing in her doorway, which was not a thing a cup should be able to do. “You must be Ethan Vale.”

“I am.”

“You found Mae’s.”

He lifted the paper bag the way a man lifted a small piece of evidence. “I got the cinnamon roll.”