Chapter 9 - The Salt Marshes
By autumn, the wedding was just a collection of expensive photographs sitting in leather albums on Aurelia’s coffee table in Georgetown, and the Whitaker family had settled back into its comfortable, predictable rhythm of mutual indifference and polite hostility.
Maribel still sent Rowan a Christmas card every year—always signed with a neat, cursive M that looked like a row of small, barbed wire fences—and Rowan still ignored them with the same quiet efficiency she applied to spam emails from overseas pension funds.
Stellan had moved into a small, cedar-shingled house three miles down the road from Rowan’s cottage in Annapolis. It had a porch that overlooked the salt marshes where the blue herons stood like grey question marks among the reeds, and a sturdy wooden dock where an old aluminum fishing boat sat tied with three separate knots of heavy nylon line.
On a cool October afternoon, when the wind was coming off the bay with that sharp, metallic tang of coming frost, Rowan walked down the wooden planks of the dock carrying a thermos of black coffee and two paper cups.
Stellan was sitting on an upturned lobster trap, working a piece of greasy sandpaper over the wooden handle of an outboard motor. His hands were dark with oil, his forearms corded with muscle and old, white scars.
“You’re late,” he said without looking up.
“The bridge traffic was backed up,” Rowan said, setting the thermos down on a wooden crate next to him. “Some tourist from Delaware tried to turn a Winnebago around on a single-lane bypass and jammed the whole causeway.”
Stellan let out a short, dry bark of laughter, set the sandpaper down, and wiped his hands on a rag. He reached out, unscrewed the cap of the thermos, and poured a dark, steaming stream of coffee into one of the paper cups.
“Did you hear about Maribel?” he asked, blowing across the surface of the liquid.
“No,” Rowan said, leaning against the wooden piling of the dock, her grey wool cardigan pulled tight around her throat against the autumn chill. “Did she buy a new lavender dress for the winter solstice?”
“Worse. She tried to tell the country club membership committee that her nephew was a personal security advisor to the President, and she accidentally mentioned that you were the one who ‘managed the switchboard’ during the Yemen crisis.” Stellan looked up, his grey eyes twinkling with a dry, wicked amusement. “The local newspaper reporter picked up the phrase The Switchboard from the club secretary’s gossip column and spent three days trying to find out what civil service grade manages naval deployments from a basement in Maryland.”
Rowan took a slow sip of her coffee. The bitter, dark taste of it settled warm and steady in her chest.
“And what did the Pentagon tell them?”
“The Pentagon told them that Miss Rowan Whitaker is a retired administrative assistant who spent twenty years filing paperwork for base housing in Norfolk,” Stellan said, a grin finally breaking across his rugged, weather-beaten face. “Which is technically true. If you don't look too closely at the security clearance files.”
Rowan smiled. It wasn't the thin, ghost-like thing she used when Maribel was in the room. It was a real, broad, unhurried smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes and made her look, for a single, fleeting second, like the girl who used to watch the sailboats on the Chesapeake before she ever learned what an encryption matrix was.
“Good,” she said, looking out over the grey, choppy water where the tide was beginning to turn toward the open sea. “Let them keep their filing cabinets. We’ve got better things to do.”
“Like what?”
May you like
“Like teaching you how to bait a blue crab line without losing your thumb,” Rowan said, tossing the empty paper cup into the trash crate. “You’ve been out of the field too long, Stellan. Your hands are getting soft.”
Stellan laughed—a deep, resonant sound that carried across the salt marshes and startled a flock of egrets into the grey October sky—and stood up to follow her back toward the house, where the kettle was already waiting on the stove and the world outside was quiet, vast, and entirely secure.
