Page 30 of Presumed Dead

She’d said it before she’d decided to. The two words came out as her feet were already on a boat she wasn't stepping onto, and Ethan looked up from the binder, and he did nothing with the two words she hadn't meant to say. He turned the binder around on the engine cover, pointed at the page, and waited.

She stepped onto the swim platform.

The Sundancer rocked once under her weight and steadied. He held the binder steady and waited.

She stood beside him at the engine cover, and she looked down at the page, and her shoulder didn’t quite touch his shoulder, and his shoulder didn’t quite touch hers, and the gap between the two was a small specific distance she was aware of with the precision a woman realized the distance between her shoulder and a man’s shoulder when the distance was the only honest thing on the boat.

She looked at the page.

Don’s handwriting. The hand-drawn inspection plate in the margin, in a slightly cramped pencil that suggested Don had added it at his dinette by lamplight at some point in the second half of his life. The schematic ran along the port side under the sole exactly the way Ethan had described it.

“You’ve been reading this for an hour.”

“An hour and ten.”

“It usually takes a man a day.”

“I’m motivated.”

She looked at him.

He was looking at her. His eyes were brown, with a small fleck of green at the right one she hadn’t had room to register yesterday because yesterday his eyes had been new, and today his eyes were the eyes of a man she had been thinking about for nineteen hours, and the green fleck was a thing that had been there yesterday too and would be there tomorrow and was, in this small careful moment at twelve twenty-one on a Wednesday, the only thing in the world.

She forgot what she’d walked over to say.

She'd walked over to ask him about the inspection plate, with the part of her that was still standing on her own dock at her own marina at her own work, that she had walked over to ask him about the inspection plate. The walking-over and the asking-about-the-inspection-plate were separate motions that her body had been planning to execute in sequence, and the second motion had gone out of her head.

She closed the binder.

“All right. I’ll let you get back to it. I have to check the cleat at nineteen.”

“Sloane.”

“Yes.”

“The cleat on slip nineteen is fine.”

She looked at him.

He looked at her.

The small, careful smile at the corner of his mouth had not gotten bigger. The eyes had not done anything they hadn’t already been doing. He was a man on a swim platform with a binder on his engine cover and a pencil behind his ear, and he had told her, with one sentence, that he had been paying enough attention to her marina yesterday afternoon to know which cleat she’d been meaning to check for three weeks, and that he was not going to make her account for either of those things.

“Is it?”

“I tightened it yesterday afternoon. I was going to tell you. I forgot.”

“All right.”

She stepped back off the boat. The Sundancer rocked once. He didn’t watch her go. She knew he didn’t watch her go because she didn’t look back to find out, and a woman who didn’t look back was a woman who already knew.

She walked back up Pier Three with the careful, particular not-looking-back walk of a woman who’d been not-looking-back at a man on a boat for the first time in years, and the not-looking-back was not the same not-looking-back she’d done when she met her ex, and the two not-lookings sat side by side in her chest for the length of the boardwalk.

She closed the office at six.

The closing was the list. She had walked it every day for eleven years, and she walked it again now — bad coffee out, pot wiped, counter wiped, till in the safe, back light off, front light off, lock the door from inside. She went out the back.

The Pyrex in the office fridge came with her.