Page 23 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

What she won’t do is get smaller. Not for Derek. Not for the network.

Not for me. And if I make her—if I’m the one who finally folds her down to fit a threat envelope—then whatever comes home from Orlando in three weeks, it isn’t her, and I’ll have done what a note taped to a door couldn’t.

I stand at the fence a long time. Mrs. Pruitt’s tomatoes go on ripening. Somewhere down the beach, a mile of open sand goes on being indefensible.

There’s a version of this job I trained for, where the answer is simple because the principal is cargo and cargo doesn’t vote. And there’s the version I’m in, where the principal is a person with a life she built on purpose, and the life is the thing you’re actually guarding. Crush it to save it and you’ve delivered a casualty with a pulse.

Fine. Then I hold the mile.

She’s at the kitchen table at dusk, laptop open, not working—I can tell because she’s still, and she’s never still inside a project. I stand in the doorway and do the thing I’m worst at in the world.

“I shouldn’t have opened with Orlando.”

She looks up. Waits. She’d wait all night; she’s generous like that and ruthless like that, both at once.

“You’re not reckless.” Each word costs about what the muffin cost, that first day, dignity-wise. “You’re the most careful person I’ve ever protected. You’re just careful about different cargo than I am. I protect the vessel.” A breath. “You protect what it’s for.”

Silence. Her eyes have gone shiny, which—noted, filed, terrifying.

“That’s the whole apology?” she says finally. “That’s it? Vessel metaphors?”

“There’s a security proposal that comes after. It has bullet points.”

“Oh my God.” But it’s wobbling at the corners, fighting itself, and losing. “Fine. Yes. I accept your nautical apology and your bullet points, and I’m sorry too—you were trying to keep me alive and I compared you toDerek, which was—he alphabetized my spice rack, Noah, you’re nothing like—I want it noted that I said the worst thing I know how to say and you said ’vessel’ at me, we are so bad at this?—”

She’s up out of the chair somewhere in the middle of it, and the kitchen’s small, and she stops an arm’s length away, close enough that I can see the day’s whole cost in her face, and the air tightens the way it’s been tightening for weeks now, every time we stand like this—one wrong move from something neither of us has said out loud.

“Bullet points,” she says. Quiet as low tide. Eyes not on the laptop.

“Tomorrow,” I manage.

Neither of us moves for three full seconds. Longest hold of my professional life.

Then she gathers her laptop and goes, and I take the shortest coldest shower on record and lie down on the couch that faces the door, and through the wall she’s not talking tonight, no monologue for the pelican, nothing—just the same charged silence that’s lying on my chest like a plate carrier.

The note said the next visit isn’t paper. They think the footage is the thing in this cottage I can’t afford to lose.

They have no idea what’s in this cottage.

Neither did I, until they made me do the math.

Chapter 9

Abby

The rain starts at ten and means it, the whole sky leaning on the coast like it has something to prove.

Florida’s usual drive-by thunderstorm gives you twenty minutes of drama and leaves. This one settles in like it’s paying rent—steady, heavy, drumming the cottage roof, rushing in the gutters, turning the world outside the windows into gray static. Good for the nests, my brain notes automatically; cools the sand. Bad for sleeping, apparently, because it’s past midnight and I’m lying here rotating like a chicken on a spit.

It’s not the rain keeping me up. Let’s be honest in the privacy of our own bedroom. It’s the three seconds.

Neither of us has mentioned the three seconds. For two days we’ve been polite—brutally, structurally polite, please and thank you and here’s-your-coffee, both of us stepping around that spot in the kitchen like there’s still something standing there. Because there is.

Two days of it. Two days of the new radar system where I know exactly where he is in any room without looking, which is a skill I did not request and cannot return. Yesterday at the beach he handed me a datalogger and our fingers overlapped for approximately zero-point-four seconds and I recorded thewrong nest number, twice, and had to white it out on a federal document. This morning he said “sleep okay?” in the normal human way he’s said it for weeks, and I answered “yep!” in a register only Carl should be able to hear, and then we both looked at the coffee maker like it was about to deliver a verdict.

The security proposal, for the record, was excellent. Bullet points, diagrams, a laminated card for my field bag with radio protocols on it. He walked me through the whole thing at the kitchen table Tuesday, professional as a tax audit, and I asked clarifying questions like a model client, and the entire time, theentiretime, the space between his shoulder and mine was conducting its own separate meeting with wildly different agenda items.

We’re adults. We’re managing it. Managing it looks like me, at 12:40 in the morning, delivering closing arguments to a ceiling fan.