Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Ethan was up before the alarm; he'd been up before the alarm every morning since he was twenty-two. He made his coffee, carried it to the cockpit, and waited for her.
He told himself he was watching the dock. He'd been telling himself that for three days. The dock was his job, and a man on a job watched the people who worked it, and Sloane Mercer worked it harder than anyone.
That was the lie he let himself keep. The truth was simpler and worse.
He waited for her in the morning because the sight of her walking out to the end of Pier Two with the green thermos in her hand was the best part of his day, and a man who had been undercover for three years didn't have a lot of best parts, and he wasn’t going to give this one up before he had to.
She came out at a quarter to six, wearing the same canvas jacket she wore every morning. Her hair was down, which it usually wasn’t this early, and she walked the long arm of the pier the way she always walked it, unhurried, like the dock was something she was greeting rather than crossing.
She stopped at slip eight, poured her coffee, and stood with her back to him and drank it.
And then she did something she had never done.
She turned around and looked at Pier Three.
She looked right at his boat, right at the cockpit, right at him, across the slip water in the gray light, and she didn’t pretend she was looking at something else, and she didn’t look away. She held it. He felt it land in his chest like a hand pressed flat against him.
He raised his coffee cup. A small thing. An inch off the gunwale.
She raised hers back.
Neither of them smiled. It was too early in whatever this was to smile, and the thing that passed between them across forty feet of water was not a smile, it was an acknowledgment, the first one either of them had let themselves make in daylight, and it was enough to keep him standing at the gunwale for a full minute after she’d turned back to slip eight, his coffee going cold in his hand, his heart doing something undisciplined and unfamiliar in his chest.
He’d told her the truth last night.
Not all of it. Enough of it. And she'd looked at him this morning like a woman who had decided to trust him before she was sure it was wise, and he was going to spend the rest of this operation trying to be worth the look.
He sat down on the gunwale and made himself drink the cold coffee.
This was the part Caleb would warn him about, if Caleb could see his face right now.
The part where the job and the wanting stopped being two separate things a man could hold in two separate hands.
He could feel them braiding together, and he knew exactly how dangerous it was, and he couldn't make himself want it to stop.
Greg Bonner came down Pier Three at eight with a tool bag and an opinion.
“You installed the pump.”
“Last night. Couldn’t sleep.”
“Show me.”
Ethan showed him. Greg got down on his knees at the engine cover with the slow care of a man whose knees had opinions of their own now, and he looked at the install for a long minute, and he ran a finger along the new hose clamp, and he grunted.
“That’s right.”
“High praise.”
“Don’t get used to it.”
Greg sat back on the gunwale and accepted the coffee Ethan handed him without being asked, and the two of them sat in the morning sun and looked at the water, and it was the kind of quiet that didn’t need anything done to it.
“You’re settling in,” Greg said.
“Trying to.”
“George likes you. Halsey doesn’t like anybody for the first six months. You’re ahead of schedule.”
“I’ll try not to ruin it.”
“Good man.” Greg drank his coffee. “Catherine likes you too, and Catherine’s a harder grade than George.”
“Catherine fed me twice in two days.”
“Then you’re basically family. God help you.”
Ethan laughed. It came easy, and it was real, and that was the part that kept catching him off guard down here, that some of it was real, that he could sit on a boat in the sun with a sixty-something charter captain and laugh at something genuinely funny and have it not be cover.
Greg looked out at the water and his face changed by a small degree.
“Pruitt’s boat went out before the storm yesterday,” he said. “Came back after.”
Ethan kept his face easy. “I heard he tied up at a friend’s place up the channel.”
“That’s what he’s saying.”
“You don’t buy it?”
“I’ve run this coast for thirty-five years. Doyle Pruitt doesn’t have a friend up the channel. Doyle Pruitt doesn’t have a friend anywhere.” Greg shrugged, a man putting something down rather than picking it up. “Not my business what he does with his boat. Just struck me funny.”
“Funny how?”
“A man takes a forty-foot diesel out into a fifty-knot blow for fun?” Greg drained his cup and stood with a hand on the rail to help himself up. “He didn’t do it for fun.”
He handed Ethan the empty cup and picked up his tool bag.
“Anyway. The pump’s good. You did right by Don’s boat.”
“Thank you, Greg.”
“Thank me by not sinking her.”
He went back up the pier, and Ethan watched him go, and the easy warmth Greg had brought down the dock with him stayed on the boat after he left. That was the thing about the good ones. They left some of it behind.
Then Ethan sat with the other thing Greg had left behind, which wasn’t warm at all.
Greg had clocked the Bertram. So had Catherine.
So had Roy. So had Sloane. Four people on this dock had looked at Doyle Pruitt running his boat through a storm and known in their bones that it was wrong, and not one of them could say why, and the not-being-able-to-say-why was the exact gap the network had been living in for years.
Decent people noticing and having nowhere to put it.
He had somewhere to put it now.
He texted Caleb the gist and went to wash Greg’s coffee cup.
By noon he had primed the last of the rail and run out of reasons to stay on the boat, and he found himself thinking about whether she had eaten.
It was a ridiculous thing to think about.
She was a grown woman who had run a marina by herself for years and had fed herself every one of those days without his help.
But he’d watched her work through lunch yesterday, and he’d watched her eat crackers at her counter the day before, and the thought of her standing at that counter again with a sleeve of saltines and a marina to run had gotten under his skin and stayed there.
So he made two sandwiches.
He had good bread, because he’d bought good bread in town like a man who intended to live somewhere, and he had the leftover grouper from George’s charter, and he made two grouper sandwiches with too much of everything the way Catherine would approve of, and he wrapped them in the wax paper he’d bought for no reason he’d been willing to name at the time, and he carried them across the parking lot to the office.
She was at the counter with the daybook open and a pen in her hand and, he saw, a sleeve of saltines at her elbow.
He set the wax paper bundle on the counter between them.
“What’s this?”
“Lunch.”
She looked at the bundle. She looked at him. The pen stopped moving.
“Lunch?”
“It’s grouper. From George’s trip. I had extra bread.”
That last part wasn’t quite a lie and wasn’t quite the truth, and she heard the gap in it, and something moved at the corner of her mouth that wasn’t a smile but was thinking about becoming one.
“You made me lunch.”
“I made two sandwiches. One of them is yours. There’s a difference.”
“Is there?”
“There has to be,” he said, “or I’m a man who walked across a parking lot to bring a woman a sandwich, and I’m not ready to be that man in front of George Halsey.”
She laughed.
It startled both of them. It was a real laugh, short and surprised, the laugh of a woman who hadn’t expected to laugh today, and it changed her whole face for the second it lasted, and Ethan stood at her counter and watched it happen and felt it go through him like warmth through cold hands.
He wanted, with a suddenness that nearly took his breath, to reach across the counter and put his hand against the side of her face.
He didn’t.
He put his hands flat on the counter instead, which was where her hands already were, close enough that he could feel the warmth coming off her skin, not close enough to touch, and she looked down at the four hands on the counter and didn’t move hers away.
They stood like that for a moment longer than two people stood at a counter about a sandwich.
“Eat with me,” she said.
It wasn’t a question, and it wasn’t quite an invitation either. It was something braver than both, a woman opening a door she’d kept shut a long time, and he heard exactly what it cost her to say it.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’d like that.”
She locked the register and flipped the little clock sign to BACK IN 30, and they sat on the weathered bench her father had built into the rail outside the office door, and they ate grouper sandwiches in the sun and watched the boats, and for a while neither of them said anything that mattered, which was its own kind of luxury.
She ate the whole sandwich. He noticed and was absurdly glad, but didn’t say so.
“It’s good,” she said around the last bite. “I didn’t think you’d be able to cook.”
“I can do about four things. This is one of them.”
“What are the other three?”
“Eggs. Coffee. And a chili that takes nine hours and is only worth it twice a year.”
“Nine hours.”
“It’s a whole thing. My grandmother’s recipe. There’s an argument in the family about whether the beans go in, and I’m on the wrong side of it, and I make it her way out of spite.”
She smiled at that, a real one this time, the kind that reached her eyes and stayed.
“You have a family.”
It came out of her carefully, like she’d picked it up to see if it was hot.
“I do,” he said.