Page 65 of Presumed Dead

“I’ve got it,” she said. Then, before she could stop herself, “Stay anyway.”

He sat down on the planking near her, his back against a piling, close enough to hand her a screw when she put her palm out and far enough that she had to reach for it, and he watched her work, and he didn’t fill the quiet with anything.

She set the new board, drove the screws, and tested it with the heel of her hand. It held. Slip eight had a sound board at the head of it for the first time in two years.

She sat back on her heels and looked at it. Then she said the thing she’d been carrying down the pier all afternoon without meaning to say it to anyone.

“I used to be afraid to fix things on this pier,” she said. “Like fixing them meant I’d decided he wasn’t coming back. Like a soft board was a place I was still holding open for him.”

She didn’t say Noah’s name. She didn’t have to. Ethan didn’t move, and he didn’t reach for her, and he didn’t say any of the useless things people said. He just listened, with his whole still attention, in a way that made her able to keep going.

“I fixed it anyway,” she said. “Just now. I don’t know what that means.”

“It means the board was rotten and you’re a marina owner,” Ethan said. “It doesn’t have to mean anything else today.”

She looked at him.

It was exactly the right thing to say, and the rightness of it undid something in her chest that years of well-meaning people had only ever made tighter. He hadn’t told her the board meant she was healing. He hadn’t told her Noah would want her to move on. He’d let the board be a board and let her be a woman who fixed it, and left the rest of it where it belonged, which was hers to decide.

She stood. He stood. They were close now, on the narrow pier in the gold light, closer than the work needed them to be, and neither of them stepped back.

She could see the green fleck in his right eye. She could see the day’s sun caught on his cheekbones and the place where his jaw needed shaving and the small white scar across his second knuckle she’d noticed the first morning and pretended not to. She could see that he was looking at her mouth, and then made himself look back at her eyes, and the effort it cost him to do that was the most honest thing a man had shown her in years.

Her heart was beating hard. She was close enough to feel the warmth coming off him, close enough that all it would take was leaning, a few inches, the smallest decision she’d make all day and the largest.

She wanted to. God, she wanted to.

And some old careful part of her, the part that had kept her standing for four years by never wanting anything she could lose, put a hand on her chest from the inside and held her where she was.

Not yet. Not on the open dock with the light going. Not with the man in slip nine and the mission she couldn’t see and the piece Ethan still hadn’t given her. Not before she was sure she could survive wanting it and not getting to keep it.

She stepped back.

She watched him see her step back, and she watched him accept it without taking it personally, which was its own small devastation, because a lesser man would have pushed and he didn’t, and the not-pushing made her want him more, not less.

“Thank you for staying,” she said. Her voice came out lower than she meant it to.

“Anytime,” he said. “I meant that too.”

She gathered her tools and the rotten board, and she walked back up the pier, and this time she let herself feel him watching her go, and she didn’t hate that she liked it.

She drove home with the radio off and the windows down and the warm evening coming in.

Her house was small and quiet and hers, three rooms above the water on the east side of the inlet, the house she’d grown up in and stayed in when staying had been the only thing she could manage. She let herself in and stood for a while at the kitchen window with the light off, looking at the dark line of the water.

She thought about what Margo had said. You just are or you aren’t. The allowed part you figure out after.

She thought about the few inches she hadn’t closed on the dock, and how they sat in her now like a held note, like something unfinished she’d have to come back to, and she knew with a certainty that frightened her a little that she was going to come back to it. Not tonight. But soon. The wanting had a momentum now, and she’d spent four years being the most careful woman in Blossom Springs, and she was tired, down to her bones, of being careful about the one thing that had finally made her laugh.

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

She’d half expected it, and she hated how fast she picked it up, and she looked at the screen and felt the foolish thing in her chest turn over.

The board looked good. Sleep well, Sloane.

She stood in her dark kitchen and read it twice, and would probably read them twice for as long as he sent them, and she thought about a hundred things she could say back and the one true thing under all of them.

She typed Goodnight, Ethan, then deleted it because it wasn’t enough, and she wasn’t ready to send the thing that would have been enough.