Page 18 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

The way she hums doing data entry, no melody on earth, just the sound of a brain at work with the radio of itself on. The rotation of the terrible t-shirts, which I could now sequence from memory, TURTLEY AWESOME on Mondays because Mondays “need help.” The three seconds of dead silence before she wins an argument—with me, with the spreadsheet, with the county lighting ordinance—the same three seconds every time; you could set charges by it. The way she saysokaytwice when a plan comes together, once for the world, once for herself, sotto voce, like a co-conspirator.

The way she banked the porch light with a red filter, because white light disorients hatchlings, and now the whole cottage sits in this dim submarine glow every night. Best tactical lighting decision anyone’s made for me all year—she did it for turtles that haven’t been born yet.

The three seconds, most of all. I watched her deploy it on the county last Thursday—she dragged me to a lighting-ordinance hearing, my first county hearing, God’s honest truth, in eighteen years of adult life—and some commissioner with a golf tan spent four minutes explaining why beachfront lighting rules would hurt tourism, and Abby sat there with her hands folded, and I watched her go quiet. Three seconds. The room didn’t know what it meant. I knew what it meant; I’ve been on the receiving end since June.

Then she stood up with her one-page handout—she’d made thefont big, she told me later,commissioners are a low-light species too—and in ninety seconds flat she had the tourism board’s own numbers showing that turtle seasonistourism, that the hatchling walks pull hotel bookings from four states, that the resort two towns over installed amber lighting and their reviews went up. No lecture. No staghorn survival rates. She’d read her audience and packed exactly the cargo they’d accept, and the ordinance moved to a vote, and it passed, and the golf tan shook her hand after.

She lectures when it’s free. When it counts, she aims. I’ve briefed operators with worse target discipline.

Doesn’t matter, any of it. That’s the operating position. She’s a principal, I’m coverage, and in a few weeks the task force closes their case and I go back to my boat, where the mornings are pewter and quiet and nobody leaves purple Sharpie notes on the rations.

The operating position develops cracks on Thursday, at 2140, during a movie.

Movie nights happened to me the way the rest of it happened to me: incrementally, then all at once. She watches nature documentaries like other people watch playoff games—openly partisan, invested in specific fish, hostile toward narrators who get cute with facts. Tonight it’s a reef episode. She’s provided commentary through the whole first act from her end of the couch, feet tucked under her, a bowl of popcorn between us functioning as a demilitarized zone.

“Okay, see that grouper? That’s the exact grouper energy of a guy at my dive site in the Keys who—Noah, I’m serious, look at hisface?—”

“I’m watching the window.”

“The window will still be dark in four seconds. The grouper is fleeting.”

I look at the grouper. She’s right. It’s the exact face of every dockmaster I’ve ever argued with. I don’t say so, but she reads the exhale, the one that isn’t quite a laugh, and she settles back with the satisfaction of a woman whose numbers came in.

The narrator says something about cleaner shrimp setting up stations on the reef, and she’s off again—“see, that’s aservice economy, that shrimp has regulars, that shrimp is Marnie”—and I catch myself tracking the argument instead of the window, which is a lapse, and I correct it, and ninety seconds later I’ve lapsed again, because she’s now assigning the entire reef to people we know. The grouper is the dockmaster. The parrotfish, “chewing scenery, contributing nothing,” is a commissioner she fought last week. The moray eel, glowering from its crevice while the reef’s commerce swirls around it, gets a long look and then, gently, “we don’t have to say it.”

“Say it.”

“You, honey.” She pats my knee, eyes never leaving the screen. “The eel is you. But see how the little fish aren’t scared of him? They know him. He’s grumpy infrastructure.”

Grumpy infrastructure. Eighteen years of qualifications and evaluations, a personnel file with commendations in it, and the truest performance review I’ve ever received is going to be a woman in a SHELL YEAH shirt assigning me an eel.

Fifteen minutes later she’s asleep.

Mid-sentence, is the thing. Even her off switch is chatty—she goes down arguing a point about parrotfish, list to starboard, and then she’s out, breathing slow, face gone young and unguarded in the red-filtered light, hair staging its nightly escape from the pencil.

The blanket lives on the back of the couch. Two feet from her. She could reach it asleep.

I sit there for a full minute, negotiating.

Cover the principal, some idiot in my head says, trying to make it tactical. It’s not tactical. Nothing about this is tactical. I’ve held perimeter in weather that killed men, and I have never once been this careful with any object on earth as I am lifting that blanket over Abby Marlowe’s shoulders without waking her.

She doesn’t wake. She burrows in, muscle memory, and makes a sound like the end of an argument she won, and I stand there in the red dark. Too long. A man checking a lock that isn’t there.

The documentary murmurs on. Something about how the reef repairs itself—polyp by polyp, the narrator says, provided conditions hold. Provided nothing hits it again.

Here’s what I know, standing in the glow of a porch light she rewired for unborn turtles, watching the rise and fall of a blanket I have no orders to have moved:

I’ve read the file on me. I know how it ends. Conditions don’t hold. Something always hits again, and the version of me that comes out the other side is the reason I work alone, on water, at dawn.

And none of that stops the ledger from balancing itself right there in the dark, in her handwriting, under a smug purple fish.

I’m not cataloging her for the detail anymore.

I’m memorizing her, and I know the difference, and I’m in so much trouble.

Chapter 7

Abby