Chapter 1 #2
“Good morning, my sweet girl.” The coffee tray landed on the counter without losing a drop. “One sugar, one cream, the way you would drink it if you were not pretending to drink it black for no reason anyone can identify. Don’t argue with me about it. Drink it.”
“I’m not arguing with you about it.”
“Yes, you are. I can hear you arguing with me about it in your head. The argument has my answer in it already, which is that I've known you for years, and you take a sugar.”
“I take a sugar.”
“There you go.”
Margo dragged out the stool she had been dragging out from under Sloane’s counter for ten years and sat down on it the way she always sat down on it, which was like she was about to be there a while and the world was going to have to make its peace with that.
She wore the loose linen shirt she wore for the kitchen prep at the Sandbar, sleeves pushed past her elbows, and the small gold cross her grandmother had given her at her confirmation, and her dark hair tied back with the same green scarf she had been tying her hair back with since two summers ago when Sloane had given it to her for her birthday.
Sloane took the coffee. The sugar was the perfect amount because Margo had been making her coffee since she'd tasted the strong brew Sloane made. She made it the way her father always had and refused to change, though she knew she should.
“How did you sleep?” Margo said.
“Four hours.”
“Liar.”
“Three and a half.”
“There she is.” Margo took the lid off her own coffee and blew on it. “What’s today?”
“New lease. Slip seventeen.”
“The ghost slip.”
“It is not a ghost slip.”
“Honey, it has had a dead man’s boat in it for a year. It is the dictionary definition of a ghost slip.”
“Don is not haunting the boat, Margo.”
“I never said Don was haunting the boat. Don was a sweetheart. Don is, if anything, hovering tastefully a few feet off the boat with a glass of bourbon and his opinions about my husband, which I am sure are sound, and which I would like to hear if there were a way.”
“Margo.”
“What?”
“Drink your coffee.”
Margo drank her coffee. She let the silence run a beat longer than she usually let silences run, which meant a question was coming. Sloane had been on the receiving end of Margo’s questions for thirty years. She knew the rhythm.
“The new tenant,” Margo said.
“Coming today.”
“Today today?”
“Sometime today. He's driving from Jacksonville. I don’t know when.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Ethan Vale.”
Margo let that sit. Margo could let a name sit longer than most people could let a name sit. She was looking at the rock holding the front door open, and not at Sloane, which was Margo’s way of being kind about a thing she was about to ask.
“Sloane.”
“Mm.”
“You ran the lease.”
“I ran the lease.”
“Clean?”
“Clean.”
“License good?”
“License is good.”
“Money cleared?”
“Yesterday afternoon. One o’clock.”
“All right.” Margo took a sip. “Then I have only one more question, and you’re not going to like it.”
“Don’t ask it, then.”
“I’m going to ask it.”
“Then ask it.”
Margo turned and looked at her. Margo had crisp blue eyes that did most of her work for her, which was a thing Margo had figured out at a young age and refined ever since. Right now the eyes were doing the kind of work eyes did when a friend was about to be honest.
“You signed your name, Sloane. With a dash. In the second email.”
“Margo —”
“I read it. Don’t look at me like that. You forwarded me the email exchange to make sure his bank routing looked right, and the second email had your name signed at the bottom with a dash in front of it, the way you sign emails to people who matter to you, and I noticed because I notice everything and you know this about me. ”
“I noticed too.”
Margo went still.
That was the thing about Margo. She could talk a person under the table for an hour, but when somebody told her something true, she went still like a cat goes still in a doorway when the light changed.
“You noticed.”
“I stared at the sent folder for ten minutes wondering why I had done it.”
“And.”
“And I haven't had an answer in four days, so I've decided to stop wondering.”
“Sweet pea.”
Sloane didn't answer that. She drank her coffee. The sugar was, in fact, the perfect amount.
“Sloane.”
“Margo.”
“Whatever he turns out to be — sweet old retiree, charming weirdo, complete waste of a parking space — you are allowed.”
“Allowed what?”
“Whatever you are going to be allowed.”
The bell over the front door dinged.
The man standing in the doorway with a duffel over his shoulder and a paper bag from Mae’s in his hand had not picked the moment, but the moment had picked him.
He stood in the open door with the morning behind him and didn't step inside until he had read the room.
Sloane registered the read. He took in the counter, the coffee pot, the shelves at the back, and the woman on the stool with her green scarf and her elbows on the wood, and he took it all in without performing the taking-in, which was a thing she didn't often see a man do.
Then he saw her.