Page 80 of Presumed Dead

“Work,” she said. Not a question.

“Work.” He looked at her, and to his credit, he didn't pretend it was nothing. “I have a friend coming through town in the next day or two. He may stop by the marina. Big guy, easy to talk to. If you see him, he's mine, he's fine, you don't have to do anything but be your normal self.”

“Does your friend have a name?”

“Graham.” He said it plainly, and she kept it, because she was building her own quiet record the way she'd built one for four years, and a name was a thing worth having. “He's a medic. Was a medic. He's good people. That's all I can give you about him, and you already know why.”

“I know why.” She looked at him a moment. The clock again. The mission moving through her marina, picking up speed, sending men with first names and no last ones through her gates. She could feel it gathering the way she could feel weather, a pressure change she had no instrument for but knew in her body all the same. “Ethan. Is this getting close?”

He didn't answer right away, and the not-answering was the answer, and he knew she'd hear it that way and let her, which she decided was its own form of honesty, the most he could give her standing in her kitchen on a Tuesday with the rain coming down.

“When it's close,” he said, “I'll tell you what I can, when I can. I won't let it land on you out of nowhere. That's a promise I can actually keep, so I'm making that one.”

It wasn't the answer. It was better than a lie, and worse than the truth, and she'd known both of those were the only two options on the table, and she'd walked across the kitchen anyway.

“Okay,” she said. “Go. I'll see you down there.”

The marina in a steady blow was a hushed, dripping version of itself, the docks dark with rain and the boats riding low and patient against their lines, and not a soul on the water who didn't have to be.

Sloane worked the morning in her foul-weather gear, walking the piers, checking the lines she and Ethan had set the night before, finding two that had taken a stretch and re-setting them, pumping a little rain out of an open cockpit on Pier One whose owner she'd be billing for the neglect. The work was the same as it had been for years, but she was not the same inside it, and she kept catching herself smiling at nothing, at a cleat, at the rain, like a woman ten years younger than the one who'd been doing this alone since her father died and Noah went out and didn't come back.

She didn't stop at slip eight on the morning pass. She noticed that she didn't, and she let it be true, and she kept walking.

Across the basin, Ethan was on his own boat doing the small endless work of a man with a fixer-upper, visible and unremarkable, and twice he looked up and caught her looking and once he lifted his coffee an inch off the rail the way he had every morning, and she lifted her chin back, and the whole private language of it ran across the green water between them and nobody watching would have read a thing.

Doyle Pruitt's Bertram sat at slip nine with the cabin buttoned up. She'd known Doyle a few years, a quiet man who paid his slip fee in cash and kept odd hours and had never given her trouble, and she'd put him in the part of her record that didn't have a name for itself yet, the part where the suspicious activity lived, the comings and goings at the wrong end of the night that she'd been writing in a notebook for four years without knowing what she was building toward. She looked at the buttoned-up boat and felt the old prickle, the one that had nothing to do with Ethan and everything to do with the four years of watching, and she made herself keep walking, because watching Doyle Pruitt too hard was a way to get noticed and she'd learned a long time ago how not to get noticed on her own dock.

Margo came at one, in a yellow slicker with the hood down because Margo would drown before she'd flatten her hair, carrying a paper bag gone translucent at the bottom and an expression Sloane could have read from the far end of Pier Three.

“I brought soup,” Margo said, coming into the office and shaking off like a dog. “It's a soup kind of day, and you forget to eat when the weather's like this, and also I have questions.”

“The soup I'll take. The questions you can keep.”

“That's not how friendship works, and you know it.” Margo set the bag on the counter and pulled herself up onto the customer stool, dripping. “You had a man's truck at your place all night. In a storm. Don't even, Sloane, Doreen drove past on her way to her sister's and called me at seven this morning like she'd seen the second coming.”

Sloane took the soup out of the bag, two containers, and got two spoons from the office drawer, and the getting of the second spoon was a small confession all by itself, and Margo's whole face caught it.

“Oh,” Margo said, quieter. “Oh, honey. You did.”

“I did.”

“And?”

Sloane handed her a container and a spoon and sat down on her own side of the counter, and she thought about how to give Margo the true thing without giving her the thing she couldn't give anyone, and found that the true thing was bigger than the secret and didn't need it.

“And I haven't felt like this in so long I forgot it was a thing that happened to people,” she said. “And it scares me to death, and I'm doing it anyway, and I need you to be happy for me and not careful for me, because I've got careful covered, I've had careful covered for years, and what I need from you is the other thing.”

Margo's eyes went bright, fast, the way they did, and she reached across the counter and gripped Sloane's wrist hard.

“I am so happy for you I could cry into this soup,” she said. “And I'm not going to be careful; I'm going to be exactly the opposite; I'm going to be thrilled and nosy and completely useless as a source of caution. But.” Her grip tightened. “You tell me if he's not what he seems. You hear me? You've had enough taken from you on this dock. I see a man hurt you, I will end him with a soup spoon. I'm not above it.”

Sloane laughed, and it came out wet, and she turned her wrist over and gripped Margo back.

“I hear you.”

“Good.” Margo let go, picked up her spoon, and pointed it across the counter. “Now tell me everything, and start with the truck, because Doreen said it was still there at six-forty.”

The rain eased toward evening into a fine blowing mist, the worst of the front grinding north up the coast, and the marina exhaled the way it did after a long blow, lines easing, water flattening, the whole place tired and dripping and intact.