Page 52 of Presumed Dead

Sloane drilled the first hole at the head of slip ten before he was off Pier Two.

He sat at the dinette with a yellow pad and a pen and the encrypted phone on the table beside him and wrote out the answer he was going to give her at five-thirty.

He wrote it three times.

The first version had too much in it. The second had too little. His third had the pieces in the order he wanted them and the language he could live with, and he read it twice and folded the page in half and put it in his back pocket and called Caleb.

Caleb picked up inside one ring.

“Where are you?”

“Cabin.”

“Five-thirty?”

“Five-thirty.”

“Read me what you’re going to say.”

Ethan pulled the page out of his back pocket and read it.

He told her he was federal. He told her he’d been on a maritime investigation for eight months. He told her the marina was on the route, that Doyle Pruitt was a person of interest and not the principal, that there was a network, and that the network ran transport in heavy weather. He couldn’t name the principal yet. There was a piece of the file he couldn’t share with her for two weeks, and the piece was not about her marina and not about Doyle, and he’d give it to her when he could. He was sorry he hadn’t told her sooner. The sooner had been a calculation, and the calculation had been operationally correct and personally wrong, and he knew the two were going to live separately in her head and he’d earn back what he could earn back.

Caleb was quiet a long count.

“That’s the middle.”

“That’s the middle.”

“She’s going to ask about Noah.”

“She’s going to ask about Doyle. Doyle isn’t Noah.”

“She’s going to get to Noah, Vale. Maybe not today. This week, next week.”

“I know.”

“When she does.”

“I’ll tell you before I tell her.”

“Vale.”

“Yes.”

“The middle is good. Don’t embellish it. Don’t apologize twice. Say it once and stop.”

“Once and stop.”

“Call me after.”

“I will.”

The line went dead.

Ethan folded the page back in half and put it in his back pocket and sat at the dinette and looked at the cabin ceiling. The afternoon was running out. The light through the port had moved from white to gold, the kind of late gold a Gulf afternoon turned at four-something in May, and the office across the parking lot had the kiosk light on, and Sloane had been at her counter for an hour and was probably eating crackers at the back counter because she’d worked through lunch.

He had crossed a line at two-forty this afternoon when he’d made her coffee in his cabin and brought it down the pier on a hunch she’d take it. She had. The taking-it had told him the line was crossed for both of them, not just for him, and the both-of-them was the part he had to be careful about, because what happened to her if he ran the op without her was less than what happened to her if he ran the op with her, and the running-it-with-her had not been part of the file when he’d driven down from David Mien’s office Monday morning.