Page 29 of Presumed Dead

“Yes.”

“Did he say anything about Noah?”

Catherine paused with the cup half to her mouth. She put it back down, looked at Sloane the way an older woman looked at a younger woman when she was choosing whether to give the younger woman the thing or the gentler version of the thing, and she chose the thing.

“He said he was sorry for my loss; he was sorry for yours; he wasn't the kind of man who would cause you any trouble. And he meant the third sentence the most.”

“All right.”

“All right.”

Catherine went out. The bell did the sound. The Pyrex sat on the counter with the tea towel over it, and Sloane stood with her hands flat on the wood and watched the door for a count of about ten breaths after Catherine was gone.

Then she lifted the tea towel and looked at the casserole.

It was beautiful. It was unreasonable. Catherine had made it with too much cheese, and the cheese had browned in the places it was supposed to brown, and she had put little paprika dots across the top in a pattern that suggested an old woman with time on her hands had decorated dinner. Sloane was going to eat it tonight; she would think about the man on her dock while she ate it. The two were no longer separable.

She put the tea towel back, put the Pyrex in the office fridge, between the half-gallon of milk and the jar of olives she’d been meaning to throw out for two months.

She closed the fridge, stood in front of it for a count of about three breaths with her hand on the door.

Then she went back to the daybook.

She walked Pier Three at twelve sixteen.

She had told herself, on the way out of the side door of the office, that she was walking Pier Three to check the cleat on slip nineteen, which was a cleat she’d been meaning to check for three weeks and which she would in fact check on the way past. The cleat on slip nineteen was the cover. The cover was the work she was making her feet do.

The cleat on slip nineteen was, in fact, fine.

She came up to the head of slip seventeen at twelve eighteen and stopped at the pylon.

Ethan was on the swim platform with the holding-tank binder open on the engine cover. He had a pencil behind his ear, the same pencil he’d had behind his ear yesterday at noon, and his head was down over a page in Don’s handwriting that had a plumbing schematic on it, and the morning sun had moved to the early afternoon angle that put the side of his face in the kind of light a woman noticed if she was paying attention to that kind of light.

She was paying attention.

She noted the paying-attention without letting it show. The shelf behind the insurance certificates would accept the new item without comment.

He looked up.

Whatever was on her face in the half-second before she’d had a chance to put a face on it, he saw, and he didn’t do anything with what he saw, and the not-doing-anything was a small precise kindness she registered on a different shelf entirely.

“Sloane.”

“Holding tank.”

“Yes.” The small, careful smile she’d seen yesterday at six thirty-two came up at the corner of his mouth. “I've been reading about it for an hour. Don wrote two paragraphs on the plumbing path that would shame an actual engineer.”

“Don was the actual engineer.”

“I’m getting that impression.”

She didn’t step onto the boat. She hadn’t stepped onto the boat yesterday and she wasn’t going to step onto the boat today, because the difference between checking on a tenant from the dock and checking on a tenant from his swim platform was the difference between two kinds of woman, and the woman on the dock was the woman she was going to remain in front of him as long as she could manage it.

“Pump-out path?”

“Forward to aft. Y-valve at the head of the salon. The diversion to the macerator runs along the port side under the sole. There’s an inspection plate Don added that isn’t on the original schematic. He drew it in.”

“Show me.”