Page 3 of Presumed Dead

He thought again about Noah Mercer signing him into slip ten on a Tuesday afternoon four Aprils ago. My sister, she’s the one with the eye for it.

Sloane. Her name hadn’t mattered then. He hadn’t asked. There’d been no reason to know — he’d been in town to look at a charter boat with a suspicious claim history, and Noah’s sister had been a sentence in a conversation that had evaporated by the time Ethan crossed the parking lot.

Ethan set the photograph down. Looking at her back made something in his chest go very quiet, and he registered that without doing anything about it. The quiet thing had been happening for some number of weeks now. He’d filed it. A thing was allowed to stay filed as long as it knew it had been filed.

“Cover?” he said.

“Same as we discussed two weeks ago. Your name is Ethan Vale. You took early retirement from a logistics company in Jacksonville. You’re divorced. No kids. Looking for a project to keep your hands busy and your head quiet. You saw the listing, drove down to look at her, and bought her from the family because you liked the bones. You took over the slip lease because the boat lives where the boat lives.”

“My name is Ethan Vale.”

“It is. And you’ve been off public-facing ops long enough that there’s nothing left to scrub. We talked about this. I want you settled on this one. Not performing. I want you to be a man who buys a boat and learns it.”

“And the smile?”

“The smile is yours. You’ve always done your best work with it on.”

“Flattery.”

“Deployment.”

David pushed the legend folder across. Ethan didn’t open it. Two weeks of being ready for it, and eight months before that of being ready for the bigger thing, and in some other sense he wasn’t going to think about today, a lot longer than that.

“Support?”

“Caleb on intelligence. Ronan and Graham both available. Mitch DeMario is a security specialist and former military in town. Jace Marriott will provide dock access and timing for any federal inspections we need to stage. He thinks he’s helping with regulatory work. Both of them are clean. Keep them that way.”

“Understood.”

“One more thing.” David didn’t slide anything across this time. “When the time comes — and it will come — you’re going to have to tell her about her brother. Not at the start. Not in the middle. At the end, when there’s nothing left to lose by saying it. You’ll know the moment. Don’t miss it.”

“You’re telling me how to handle this.”

“I’m telling you this woman has been waiting four years for somebody to walk into her marina and tell her the truth. When you do it, do it right.”

Ethan looked at the photograph of her back one more time. The wind. The rope. The cleat under her hand. Last Thursday morning, the date said. She’d been on that dock at the same hour he’d been eating breakfast in a tent four hundred miles north of her.

“You sure you're ready for this one?” David asked.

He asked it the way he asked things when he already knew the answer. Ethan met his eyes across the table.

“I’m sure.”

“All right.”

David slid the photograph into the folder with everything else. He closed the folder and stood up. Ethan stood with him.

“Ethan.”

“Yeah.”

“Eat something on the road. Don’t show up there hungry. People notice when a man’s hungry.”

“Noted.”

"And David —" Ethan paused at the door. He hadn't planned to say what he said next, but he said it anyway. "My folks. Do they still call?"

David didn't turn around. He didn't need to.