Prologue #2
“One more thing.” David didn’t slide anything across this time. “When the time comes — and it will come — you’re going to have to tell her about her brother. Not at the start. Not in the middle. At the end, when there’s nothing left to lose by saying it. You’ll know the moment. Don’t miss it.”
“You’re telling me how to handle this.”
“I’m telling you this woman has been waiting four years for somebody to walk into her marina and tell her the truth. When you do it, do it right.”
Ethan looked at the photograph of her back one more time. The wind. The rope. The cleat under her hand. Last Thursday morning, the date said. She’d been on that dock at the same hour he’d been eating breakfast in a tent four hundred miles north of her.
“You sure you're ready for this one?” David asked.
He asked it the way he asked things when he already knew the answer. Ethan met his eyes across the table.
“I’m sure.”
“All right.”
David slid the photograph into the folder with everything else. He closed the folder and stood up. Ethan stood with him.
“Ethan.”
“Yeah.”
“Eat something on the road. Don’t show up there hungry. People notice when a man’s hungry.”
“Noted.”
"And David —" Ethan paused at the door. He hadn't planned to say what he said next, but he said it anyway. "My folks. Do they still call?"
David didn't turn around. He didn't need to.
"They do. Like clockwork."
"All right."
“It’s been a long time, Ethan.”
“I know how long it’s been. I don’t need you keeping the calendar for me.”
David turned then. The almost-smile came back, smaller than before. “One thing at a time. Get Sloane Mercer her brother. We’ll get you your family after.”
Ethan nodded once. His voice wasn’t going to hold for the next sentence, so he went out.
The drive to Blossom Springs took five hours.
Tampa was a flight away. Renting from there would have worked.
He didn’t. The road was what he wanted — the long arc of pavement, the slow shift of the light, the time to put on the man he was about to be.
Not because Ethan Vale was a different man from the one driving.
Because the version of him that showed up at Sloane Mercer’s marina needed to be steadier.
Quieter. A version that wasn’t carrying the weight of a watch with two engraved words on the back of it.
Or the weight of a woman’s back at the end of a dock.
That second weight had been a surprise. The first one was operational. He knew what to do with operational weight. The second one didn’t have a category yet, and he hadn’t been carrying it long enough to know what shelf to put it on, and the drive was as good a place as any to figure that out.
The first hour was for the watch. The second hour was for Noah Mercer.
The third was for the family he wasn't allowed to call — for the calls that came in like clockwork on a number he hadn't answered in three years, for his mother at her kitchen table in Pensacola wondering whether her son was alive, for his father working through the list of people who might know something and getting no one, for his sister who had stopped leaving voicemails eighteen months ago because the silence on the other end had finally taught her what silence was.
They didn't know where he was. They didn't know if he was safe. They kept calling anyway.
Three Christmases now. Three birthdays. Two funerals he hadn’t been to — an aunt, then his father’s oldest brother — and a wedding for his cousin Tess that he’d only known about because a junior tech at the office had pulled the announcement off a public Facebook page and slid it across his desk without saying anything.
Three years and two months. Different pieces of the same animal.
Sloane Mercer’s brother was one piece. The eight-hundred-acre property north of town was another.
The Bertram was a third. A man named Doyle Pruitt was a fourth, and there were others Ethan hadn’t put faces to yet, and underneath all of them was the syndicate that had taken Harrison Montgomery’s name as cover and outlived him by a decade.
When Montgomery had run to Switzerland the week of Graham and Maren’s wedding, every operator on the team had felt the same small, unprofessional satisfaction. Caleb had said at the reception, He comes back; we take him. That had been the line. Everyone had toasted to it.
Ethan’s line, the one he carried south on I-95 with the Gulf appearing and disappearing between trees on his right, was older and quieter. We get her brother back. Then we get me back.
The Sea Ray was already in slip seventeen.
She’d been there for a year and change, since her owner had died and his family had decided to sell.
The slip fee had been bleeding the estate for ten months.
Sloane had taken the listing on as a courtesy and had not, in the photographs David’s team had pulled, looked like a woman who enjoyed brokering boats.
She looked like a woman who did a thing because somebody had asked her to, and the somebody was tired and grieving.
Ethan had bought the boat sight-unseen from a dock photo, which any sensible person would call reckless. The seller’s widow had been delighted. Sloane, according to the email she’d sent him an hour after the wire cleared, had been surprised.
The boat needs significant work, she’d written.
I want to be sure you’ve had a chance to see her in person before you commit.
If you’d prefer to wait and look her over once you arrive, I can hold the slip lease for you without the deposit while you decide.
The family knows you’re coming. They’re patient.
He’d read the email twice. The first time, for content. The second time, for her.
She wrote like a woman used to people trying to get one over on her.
Careful. Honest in a way that pre-empted the dishonesty of others.
She was telling him the boat was in worse shape than he probably understood, and she was telling him because she didn’t want him driving five hours to find out she hadn’t.
There was a kind of courtesy in it he hadn’t seen from a stranger in a long time.
He’d written back. I appreciate the warning. I’ve made my peace with the boat — and with the slip. Tell the family the deposit clears today. And tell me your favorite breakfast place. I’ll be in town by Sunday.
He’d looked at that for a long time before he sent it. The breakfast place was a calculated risk. A man buying a fixer-upper sight-unseen would either be an idiot or someone with a sense of humor about himself, and the email had to read as the second if any of this was going to work.
What he hadn’t accounted for was that he’d also wanted to hear back from her. Not the operator wanting the asset to engage. The man at the keyboard wanting a woman with careful words to write him another email.
She’d written back two hours later. Mae’s Bakery on Main Square. Get the cinnamon roll. They’re better than the rolls have any right to be. — Sloane.
He’d read that one three times. The third time, he’d read it sitting in the parking lot of his apartment in Jacksonville with the truck already loaded, and he’d sat there for ten minutes with the engine running before he’d pulled out.
Sloane. He’d written her name down in his own handwriting four years ago on an insurance form Noah had handed him. Marina contact: Noah Mercer. Co-owner: Sloane Mercer. He’d written it without looking. There’d been a hundred forms like it that month.
Now he was driving to her.
The highway curved. The Gulf appeared between trees, then disappeared, then appeared again. Ethan didn’t catalog it. He let it be water, then light on water, then the sound of the road under the tires.
Somewhere around the county line, the phone buzzed. Caleb.
You there?
Almost.
First impression of the asset?
Ethan thought about the photograph. The woman with her back turned.
The rope she’d forgotten she was holding.
The two-line email about a cinnamon roll.
Her brother’s voice four years ago, saying, My sister, she’s the one with the eye for it, and the four years that had passed since Ethan had heard it without hearing it.
She’s been waiting, he wrote.
For what?
He didn’t answer right away. The road climbed a low rise, and the water opened up below him. Blue as a thing that didn’t know it was beautiful. Sun scattered across it in the late afternoon, like nobody had figured out how to ration it.
For somebody to come back with the truth, he wrote finally. I’m going to try not to be a disappointment.
You won’t be.
That’s flattering.
That’s data. Eat the cinnamon roll.
Ethan let the phone go face-down on the passenger seat.
He drove the rest of the way without picking it up again.
The sun came down on his left and the Gulf rose on his right, and somewhere ahead of him a woman who didn’t know his face yet was finishing her afternoon at a marina she had run alone for four years.
Her hand on the cleat in the photograph. The rope she’d forgotten she was holding. What it would be like to walk into her office tomorrow morning, shake her hand, and not be the man who knew.
Ethan drove faster than he meant to for the last hour. The road, he told himself. Just the road.