Page 24 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“Okay,” I tell the ceiling fan, finally, throwing off the sheet. “Ruling from the bench. This is now a hydration issue.”

Water. I need water, and the kitchen is a public thoroughfare, and I’m allowed to hydrate in my own rental. I get up, and I do not check my hair in the dark of the mirror on the way out, and if I do, it’s for science, and the science says it’s doing something between “storm survivor” and “sea witch,” and there’s no time to fix it without losing my casual timestamp, so the sea witch proceeds to the kitchen.

He’s there. Of course he’s there. Two days of avoiding each other in eight hundred square feet, and the universe books us both into the kitchen at half past midnight, because the universe has been reading over Marnie’s shoulder and wants its cut of the pool.

Sitting at the kitchen table in the red-filtered dark, no phone, no coffee, nothing—just Noah and the rain-noise and one of those channel-marker postures, upright, out at sea. He’sin a t-shirt and sweats, barefoot, which after weeks of tactical everything reads as shockingly undressed, like catching a knight in the parking lot holding his helmet.

“Couldn’t sleep?” I ask, which is a stupid question, and he does me the honor of not answering it. His eyes do the room-scan anyway—window, door, me—and land on my hair, and one eyebrow moves a millimeter, which in Noah is a standing ovation of curiosity.

“Sea witch,” I explain, with dignity.

“Suits you,” he says, to the table, and my heart forgets its whole job for a second.

I fill a glass at the tap, slow, buying time I pretend not to need. The rain hammers. I should take the water and go, that’s what the ballet calls for, a nod at the doorway, exit stage left, and instead I hear myself say, to the window, “When it rains like this, I think about my dad. He was a marina mechanic. Rain days meant he was home, and he’d make pancakes at weird hours and quiz me on fish. I know it’s not the same kind of remembering you do. But rain at night—it always lands somewhere, doesn’t it? Everybody’s got weather that lands.”

For a while, just the storm.

“Is he still around?” Noah asks. “Your dad.”

“Retired. Sarasota. He and Mom have a condo and a betta fish named Admiral, and he consults at the marina down there two days a week because retirement ’didn’t take.’” I turn around and lean on the counter. “He’d like you. He’s suspicious of anyone who talks more than a two-stroke engine, which has made Thanksgiving complicated for every boyfriend I’ve ever had, but you—he’d hand you a wrench within the hour. That’s his whole love language. Wrenches.”

“You get the talking from your mom, then.”

“I get the talking from both of them, they just take turns. You should hear a Marlowe car trip. The Admiral has opinions.”The rain surges against the window, a long gust, and the palm shadows thrash. “Nest 41’s fine, by the way. I know you saw me check the radar four times. Storm surge won’t reach that high on the profile, and the rain cooling actually helps at this stage. I’m telling you because you’re too polite to ask and your face was doing surveillance about it.”

“My face doesn’t do surveillance.”

“Your face is a fusion center, Noah.”

For a while, just the storm again. But a warmer grade of it now.

“Rain’s fine,” Noah says. His voice sounds like it’s been sitting unused for hours. “Rain on a metal roof, moving water, that’s fine. It’s the quiet after I don’t like.”

I don’t say anything. I’ve learned this much: with him, questions close doors and silence opens them. Glass in both hands, I lean against the counter and wait, heart going hard for no reason my body will explain to me.

“You asked about the Navy,” he says. “On the porch.”

“You don’t have to?—”

“I know.” He turns the chair a little. In the red dark his eyes catch what light there is, steady on me, and for once he’s not scanning anything else in the room. “That’s why it’s possible.”

First, though, because I’m me, I cut two slices of Mrs. Pruitt’s pie and put one in front of him, and he looks at it, and then at me, and something about the ordinariness of it—pie, plates, forks, midnight—seems to unlock the last hinge. You can’t tell your worst story to an interrogation lamp. You can tell it to a woman eating pie at your elbow like there’s nowhere else on the calendar.

So I put down the glass, and I sit down slow at my own kitchen table like it’s holy ground, and Noah Vance talks.

He talks for a long time. Longer than I’ve heard him say anything, in a voice with all the briefing scrubbed out of it, low and even, sanded down to fact.

He starts with the easy coordinates. Enlisted at nineteen, out of Michigan, because the recruiter promised him water and the water part turned out to be true. Boarding team, maritime interdiction. Eight years in, good at it, believed in it. He says that part without flinching,I believed in it, like handing over the sharpest thing first so I know what everything after cost. A night operation, a coastal freighter flagged for weapons transit. Intelligence was specific. Command was certain. He was certain. They breached a hold expecting cargo and found people—families in transit, the wrong vessel identified by the right paperwork, and in the dark and the panic and the boarding chaos, before anyone understood the mistake, it went wrong. He doesn’t inventory it. He says numbers, and then he stops saying numbers.

“I followed every order,” he says. “Every procedure. Review board confirmed it. Cleared. That was supposed to be the end of it—cleared.” His thumb moves once over the tabletop, like smoothing a chart. “Nobody tells you a clearance is just the noise stopping. You’re still standing in the hold. Some part of you doesn’t ship out again.”

The rain fills in where words would go. I keep my hands wrapped around my glass so they don’t do anything on their own, and I keep listening, because he’s still going. About after.

“The counselor had a checklist,” he says. “Sleep hygiene. Grounding techniques. ’Avoid isolation.’ I initialed the checklist and then I drove until the water got warm. Mobile, Pensacola,down the coast. Private security’s easy to get into if you don’t ask questions about the clients, so I didn’t, and the details were fine—estates, executives, nothing that breathed on me. Eight years of that.” His thumb finds the table edge. “Then a job went sideways in Miami. Nothing dramatic. Client’s kid got grabbed at by a paparazzo, I put the guy on the ground harder than the situation needed, and I stood there with my knee in his back and realized I couldn’t tell anymore. Whether it was judgment or just—pressure, looking for a crack to come out of. So I quit. Sat on a dock in Sunbreak with a duffel bag, deciding between here and nowhere.”

“And Rafi found you.”

“Rafi docks his boat there. He watched me sit for three days. Third day he came down with two sandwiches and a maritime patrol contract, and he said—” and here Noah’s voice shifts, dry, a decent impression of a man I’ve only met by phone—“’You read the water or the water reads you, kid. Might as well get paid for the direction you’ve picked.’” A pause. “He never asked about before. Two years, he’s never asked. He just kept me pointed at the horizon until I could hold the heading myself.”