Epilogue #2
“We're not taking that tonight,” Ronan said, and it was the coordinator's voice, the one that closed a meeting before the energy in a room ran ahead of the facts.
“Montgomery's in Switzerland and the land's not going anywhere, and we do this one right, slow, on paper, the way Shaw likes it, because if we move early we lose it. But I wanted the whole team to hear the shape of it in one room on one night, because this is the next thing. This is the thing the next few years are about. And when we take it—” he let himself show the smallest edge of a grin, “when we take eight hundred acres and a runway off a man who wiped them off the map, I can think of worse places to move this operation than a property he built to hide his sins. Turn the whole thing into something that does the opposite.”
Ethan sat with his beer and the easy weight of the team around him and felt the next several years arrange themselves in front of him, the work that would keep him in Blossom Springs, the long patient case that would end with the team rooted on ground reclaimed from the worst thing in this county, and he felt, for the first time since David Mien had slid a folder across a table in a room with no name, that the work and the life were going to happen in the same place, to the same man, under his own name.
He made the call from the end of Pier Three the next morning, early, before the marina woke, because some things a man did at the hour when he couldn't talk himself back out of them.
His mother answered on the second ring, as she'd answered every call he hadn't been able to make for three years, fast, hopeful, braced, a woman who'd never once stopped picking up on the chance it might finally be him.
There was a silence after he said, "Mom," that went on long enough that he thought the connection had dropped, and then he heard her sit down, heard the chair squeak, heard three years come out of her in one broken breath.
He didn't try to explain it on the phone.
He couldn't, most of it, and the part he could, would have to wait for a face-to-face and a security clearance she'd never have, so he gave her the true things he was allowed: "I'm all right.
Safe, the work that had taken me so deep undercover is finished.
" He heard the breath rush from her lungs and gave her a moment.
"I'm sorry, Mom. I've never been sorrier every single day for what you all have been through. "
She cried, "I'm just so relieved you're okay. I thought they were lying to us when we asked."
He heard the phone shift, and his father got on the line. His ragged breathing said so much more than any words could. But the one thing that undid Ethan completely was, "Your sister kept your room."
Emotion clogged his throat. He practiced the breathing techniques he'd been taught; it didn't help. His hands shook, and he squeezed the phone tighter.
“I want you to come down here,” Ethan said when he could.
“All of you. Mom, Dad, Tess, whoever's left that still claims me.
There's a town down here on the Gulf called Blossom Springs and I've got a boat in a marina and I'm not leaving it.
There's somebody I need you to meet, and I'm done being a man you have to wonder about. Come down. Let me cook you something on a boat that barely runs and introduce you to the reason I am finally free to live on top of the world, not under it.”
His mother was quiet for a moment. Then she said, in the voice she'd used when he was small and had finally admitted to something, “There's a somebody.”
“There's a somebody.”
“What's her name?”
“Sloane,” he said, and saying her name to his mother on the end of his own dock in the early light did something to his chest that three years of dangerous work had never managed.
“Her name's Sloane, and she runs this marina, and she's the bravest person I've ever met, and she knows everything, Mom.
Everything I am and everything I did. She knows all of it, and she's still here.
You're going to love her. Dad's going to love her. She fixes things.”
“Then we're coming,” his mother said, simple as that, three years folded up and set aside in four words, the thing she'd been waiting all this time to be allowed to do. “You tell us when.”
He told Sloane about the call that evening, on her porch, the two of them in the chairs that had become theirs in the slow accumulating way everything between them had become theirs, and she listened to the whole of it with her feet tucked under her and her eyes wet by the end.
“You invited them here,” she said. “To meet me?”
“I invited them here to meet the reason I'm a person again. That's you. I didn't ask first, which I probably should have, so if you'd rather not be introduced to a Pensacola family who’s going to cry on you and hug you too hard and ask you when the wedding is—”
“When the wedding is?” Sloane repeated, and there was something careful in how she said it, the careful he'd learned to read as the opposite of hesitation, the careful of a woman approaching a thing she wanted and would not pretend she didn't.
Ethan went still. They looked at each other across the small space between the two chairs, and the thing that had been building under every ordinary day for weeks came up into the open and stood there, and neither of them reached for a joke to put it back down.