Page 12 of Presumed Dead

“She’s been waiting for somebody to take her seriously,” he said.

He hadn't meant to say it out loud. He had meant to think it. The sentence was out of his mouth before he had cleared it for export, and he registered the sentence after it had landed, and he registered Sloane Mercer’s silence behind him at the same moment.

It was the kind of silence that meant something underneath it had moved.

He turned around.

She was watching him. She wasn't smiling or doing the customer-service face. She was looking at him the way a person looks at an animal that has done something a little smarter than they had expected, and there was nothing in her face that committed to anything yet, but there was something in her face that had not been there in the office.

“You see her,” she said.

“I see her.”

“Most people who looked at her saw a wreck.”

“Most people don’t know how to look at a 1998 Sundancer.”

“You do.”

“I worked logistics for fifteen years. I saw a lot of boats.”

“Logistics.”

“Logistics.”

She held his eyes for a beat longer than the answer required. Then she looked away — not in retreat, but in the small way a person looked away when they had decided to file something and come back to it later.

“All right,” she said. “Walk her with me. I’ll show you what you actually bought.”

They went around the boat in twenty minutes.

Sloane talked the way a person talked who had lived on docks her whole life and had stopped explaining what every word meant a long time ago. She used transom and gunwale and cleat without softening them for him, and when she said the sole’s going to need replacing in three places, I can show you where, she didn't pause to check whether he knew what the sole was.

Ethan kept up. He asked questions when he had them and didn’t ask questions when he didn’t. What he was paying attention to, while she walked him through the boat, was her hands.

Her hands were a marina owner’s hands — brown and capable, with a small white scar on the knuckle of the right index finger and a callus along the side of the left thumb that he recognized as a rope callus before he had consciously identified it. The way she put her palm on the toe rail to brace herself as she crouched to point at a soft place in the sole was the way a person put her hand on a boat she knew, the way other people knew the layout of their own kitchen. She didn't look at the boat when she put her hand on it. She didn't need to.

Noah had been a marina owner too.

The thought arrived without his permission. He let it pass through him without holding onto it. Eight months he had spent learning how to let thoughts about Noah pass through him without holding onto them when there was nothing he could do with them in the moment, and standing on a dock with Noah’s sister, talking about a boat, was not a moment he could do anything with a thought about Noah.

“The bilge pump is original,” Sloane said, crouching at the stern and pointing into the engine compartment. “It works. It shouldn’t, but it does. I would replace it before I trusted it on a long run.”

“Noted.”

“The starboard engine has a leak around the manifold. Small. Watch it.”

“Noted.”

“Battery bank is two years old, which means it’s a year past where you’d want it, but you’ll get a season out of it if you’re careful.”

“Noted.”

She straightened up and looked at him.

“You’re not writing any of this down.”

“No.”