Page 57 of Presumed Dead

She sipped her coffee.

“Ethan.”

“Yes.”

“When you’re done with this...”

She stopped. She’d been about to ask something she wasn’t ready to ask, and she stopped herself before she got to the end of the question, and what she found instead was a different question.

“When you’re done with this,” she said, “is the man on my dock a special operative or is he Ethan Vale?”

He set his cup down.

The afternoon sun was at the front window of the office in the slow gold angle of a Gulf evening in late May, and it was on his cheekbones and on the small lines at the corners of his eyes and on the side of his jaw that hadn’t had a razor on it since yesterday morning, and he looked at her across her own counter with an answer he’d been holding in his chest.

“He’s Ethan.”

“Ethan Vale isn’t your real name.”

“Vale’s my real name. Ethan’s my real name.”

“Vale and Ethan are real?”

“Yes.”

“Logistics isn’t real.”

“Logistics isn’t real. The boat’s real. The work I’ve done on her is real. The conversations I’ve had with you since Tuesday morning are real. The conversation I had with Catherine yesterday morning is real. The cup of coffee I brought you at two-forty is real.”

“How do I know which sentences are the real ones?”

“Ask me. I’ll tell you.”

“Now?”

“Now and after.”

She stared at him.

"Okay."

They drank the coffee at her counter.

It took about fifteen minutes. They talked little after his revelation. He asked her about the cleat she’d set at slip ten that afternoon and she told him it was going to hold, and he asked her about the soft board at slip eight and she told him it was the next thing on her list. He asked her about her father’s 2007 cleat repair and she told him her father had done the original install in 1989 and the 2007 cleat was the second one, set into a patch her father had cut from a piece of southern yellow pine he’d salvaged off a working pier in Cedar Key after Hurricane Charley, and Ethan listened to that without interrupting and without trying to fix anything.

It was twenty minutes past six when he set the cup down.

“Sloane.”

“Yes.”

“Two things before I go.”

“Okay”

“First. If anything on this dock feels wrong — a tenant you don’t know walking down a pier, a car in the lot you don’t recognize, a phone call hangs up when you answer — you call me. Don’t wait. Don’t think about whether it’s worth bothering me. Call me.”

“Okay.”