Chapter 9 #2
She got off the stool and walked to the back counter and put a pot of coffee on. Her legs were steadier than she had initially thought they would be.
The questions continued to barrage her brain. “What do you want me to do?”
“Nothing different from what you have been doing. Go about your business as usual.”
“Nothing. But that will require me to come in contact with Doyle.”
"You've been in contact with him all this time."
"But now I know."
"Yes, you do. And I'm sorry. But you asked."
"I did, didn't I?"
Ethan's eyes stared into hers. His brown eyes and that green fleck now looked at her with concern. Also, something else. Something she wanted to name but refused to think about now. Time and place. This wasn't either one.
“He’s going to ask me about you.”
“He will. Remember, he'll be paranoid. He's lying and committing crimes; he'll think everyone either knows or is trying to figure it out."
“What about Catherine?”
“Catherine has decided I’m the kind of man on this dock who ought to know things. She volunteered intel on a white pickup and a visitor to Doyle on Monday night. She decided, separately, not to tell you.”
“She didn’t tell me.”
“She said you were carrying too much by yourself already and didn’t want to hand you another problem. She trusted me with it instead.”
Sloane took that in. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
"Does she know who you are?"
“She doesn't. We’ll talk about Catherine later.”
“Later.”
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.”
“Second. The same goes the other way. If anything I do feels wrong — a sentence that doesn’t add up, a place I am that I shouldn’t be, a moment when I look at you in a way that makes you wonder — ask me. Now, not later.”
“All right.”
“And, Sloane.”
“Yes.”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For the two weeks.”
She didn’t answer. She'd said she wouldn't, so she didn't. But it would be a long two weeks.
She walked him to the side door. He didn’t reach for her hand or her elbow.
At the door, he turned around and looked at her for a count of about three breaths in the warm gold light coming in over the kiosk, and what was on his face wasn’t an apology and wasn’t a question and wasn’t the small careful smile she’d seen at the corner of his mouth on Tuesday morning.
It was something she hadn’t seen on a man’s face in a long time.
She didn’t name it. She let it be.
He turned and stepped through the door. The side door closed behind him, and she felt an emptiness she hadn't felt in years. It was different from the emptiness of losing her parents. It was different than the ache in her heart when the Coast Guard told her Noah's boat was found but not Noah.
Ethan had said the piece he hadn't told her was about a person. She sent up a silent prayer; it was about Noah. Though he hadn't said he knew anything about Noah, she hoped that mystery would be over and he'd tell her they were actually here looking for him and they'd found him.
As she turned the lock on the door, the memory of Ethan's face and the way he looked at her rushed back to her.
There was something about Ethan Vale, besides the mystery of his job and his presence here, that called to a part of her heart that had been dormant for a long time.
That was what she'd take home with her tonight.
Maybe he'd change her life in more than one way before this was all over. A girl could hope.