Page 13 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

We’re at the door when Marnie calls after us. “Abby. Saturday still on? Book club’s doing the ocean one, on account of you’ve radicalized us.”

“It’s calledThe Soul of an Octopusand it’s going to change your life, Marnie. Tell Deb to actually read it this time. She can’t just watch a documentary and vibe.”

“Deb’s going to just watch a documentary and vibe.”

“I know.” Abby sighs like a general accepting casualties and steers us out into the heat with my candle coffee and her list of six more stops.

We make four of them. The hardware store, where she talks the owner into donating turtle-safe bulbs for the pier and somehow exits owing nothing and holding a free key ring. The library, where she returns three books and has a whispered argument with the librarian about whether whale song counts as language, which she wins, in a library, at a whisper. The bait shop for Gus’s standing order. The post office, where the line is six deep and she knows five of them.

At every stop, the same routine plays out around me: two beats of curiosity about the wall in the doorway, then Abby’s introduction, then the town folding me in like batter. By the time we’re back in the truck, I’ve been invited to a fish fry, a poker night, and something called a “porch crawl,” and I have a free key ring in my pocket that I don’t remember accepting.

“You’ve been introducing me all week,” I say, pulling out of the lot, checking the mirrors. “Deliberately. Building me a—what would you call it.”

“A network,” she says, sunny, no shame at all. “You watch the streets, I work the people. Nobody’s sneaking a strange faceinto this town now, Noah. Forty pairs of eyes just adopted you.” She sips her lavender abomination. “Also you needed friends. Dual-use infrastructure. It’s very tactical, you’d love it if you’d invented it.”

I check the mirror again so she can’t see my face doing whatever it’s doing.

Dual-use infrastructure. She weaponized a porch crawl. Rafi would hire her by Friday.

Here’s what I can’t square, sitting on the cottage porch that evening while Abby argues with her data on the other side of the screen door.

I’ve worked details where the principal treated me like furniture with a gun. That’s the job. That’s fine. The job is to be a wall—you watch the vectors, you stay out of the weave of things, and at the end nobody knows your first name and everybody’s alive. Clean.

Thirteen days in, this whole town knows my first name. The produce guy calls me Big Noah to distinguish me from a cat, apparently, named Regular Noah. Mrs. Pruitt made me pie and stood there while I ate it, grading my technique. The perimeter guys have lemonade. I’ve been offered three fishing trips, one blind date I declined so fast the harbormaster apologized to me, and a standing seat at Flamingo Bingo, whatever that is, and God willing I’ll never find out.

She did that. Six weeks ahead of me in this town, and she’d already built the thing she’s now stitching me into, one introduction at a time, like it’s nothing. Like it costs nothing.

I know exactly what it costs. That’s the difference between us. You let a place all the way in, you let people all the way in, andthen one bad night takes the whole grid down at once. I’ve been the bad night. I’ve stood in the middle of the grid going down.

Cheaper to stay a lighthouse. Light, at intervals. Nothing on the rock to lose.

Inside, something clatters. “I’m okay!” she calls, automatically, before I can even ask. Then, lower, to the laptop: “That’s a you problem, spreadsheet. I cited you generously.”

I check the tree line out of habit. Wind. A rabbit by the fence. Nothing.

The radio clicks twice on my hip—Delgado, top of the hour, all quiet. I click back once. Out past the dunes, a boat’s running lights slide south, too far off to read, and I track it till it clears the point, because that’s the job: the water’s where they’ll come from, if they come. The task force says the network’s stretched thin and getting thinner, and stretched-thin operations either fold or lunge. No way to know which from a porch.

What I know from the porch is this: dinner smells like garlic, the principal is winning an argument with a spreadsheet, and I’ve stopped thinking of the couch as a punishment, which should worry me more than the boat.

Thirteen days, and the honest ledger reads like this: she is a target on an active list, she is the single most exhausting human being I have ever guarded, and yesterday at the beach shower she laughed at her own joke before she finished it, this full-tilt collapse of a laugh, and I turned to check what was funny before I remembered I don’t do that.

I don’t turn toward things. I watch vectors.

The screen door creaks. “Hey, wall,” she says softly, through the mesh. “There’s dinner if you want it. It has vegetables and everything. Don’t panic.”

Vector, I remind myself, and I get up off the step anyway.

Chapter 5

Abby

Dinner has vegetables and everything, and Noah eats two servings, and I’m feeling pretty good about the state of the world right up until he ruins it with information.

To be fair, I asked. That’s on me. We’re doing dishes—he washes, I dry, an arrangement we fell into on night two without discussing it, the way you fall into the good kind of habit—and I ask the question I’ve been circling all week, ever since Renata’s voice went careful on the phone.

“So what did I actually film? Because everyone keeps sayingsmuggling networkin this hushed voice, and my brain keeps serving up, like, guys in striped shirts rowing a crate of rum.”

Noah rinses a plate, hands it over, and takes a moment. He does that. Weighs whether to give it to you straight. I watch the decision land.