Page 8 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

The overhead light snaps on.

Noah is sitting at my kitchen table. Fully dressed. Arms crossed. He has the stillness of a gargoyle and the expression of a disappointed parish priest, and there are two mugs of coffee on the table, one in front of the empty chair.

I clutch my sneakers to my chest and say, with tremendous dignity, “This isn’t what it looks like.”

“It’s 0450.”

“I sleepwalk.”

“With a packed field bag.”

“I’m a very organized sleepwalker.”

He doesn’t laugh. Obviously he doesn’t laugh, laughing costs him eleven dollars a word. But he nudges the second mug an inch toward the empty chair, and that’s how I know I’ve been made since before I got out of bed.

“How?” I sit. The coffee’s exactly how I like it, which is annoying, because it means he’s been cataloging me right back. “I was silent. I practiced the door.”

“Board outside your room creaks. You skipped it.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “So you loaded weight on the left. Which meant you were carrying the bag.”

“That’s genuinely creepy. You get that, right? That’s a creepy skill.”

“Dawn reading at the nest,” he says, ignoring this. “That’s the mission?”

“It’s not amission, it’s a temperature check. Look.” I pull the clipboard out of my bag, because if he wants a briefing, buddy, I will give him a briefing. “Sand temperature determines sex ratios in loggerhead hatchlings. Warmer nests skew female. I’m tracking morning lows against my dataloggers because nest 41 is high on the beach, in the dune shade, and if my hypothesis is right, that one nest might be quietly producing half the males on this stretch of coast. This is the kind of data you can only get by being there. At dawn. Consistently. It cannot wait for a threatassessment, because the eggs, and I need you to internalize this, do not know about the smugglers.”

Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stood up. I don’t remember standing up. I’m holding the clipboard like a preacher holds a Bible, and Noah is looking up at me with his coffee halfway to his mouth and an expression I can’t read at all.

“No,” he says.

One word. One! I just gave him a whole TED talk.

“Noah.”

“You planned to leave, alone, in the dark, without telling me, on the exact route anybody watching this cottage would predict.” Still level. Still quiet. Somehow that’s worse. “The answer to that plan is no.”

“Okay, when you phrase it like that, it has a certain flavor, but?—”

“There’s no but.”

“There’s always a but. Butts are load-bearing in my arguments.” I drop back into the chair and switch tactics, because bargaining is a science and I am a scientist. “Fine. Compromise. I go, you watch from the dunes with your scary binoculars.”

“No.”

“I go, and you stand directly next to me radiating disapproval.”

He considers that one for a second. Progress.

“I wear the SHELL YEAH shirt so any snipers know I’m not a threat?—”

“Don’t,” he says, “joke about snipers at 0500,” and there’s a splinter of something under the flat tone, something that makes me put my mug down and actually look at him. The gray light through the kitchen window catches the lines of his face, and it occurs to me—belatedly, because it’s early and because he makes it so easy to forget—that this man does this jobbecause somewhere along the line, the worst version of it already happened to him.

“Sorry,” I say, and I mean it, and I let one whole beat of silence go by, which for me is basically a moment of silence lasting a fiscal quarter. “But I’m not negotiating about whether the readings happen. Just how.”

He studies me over the coffee. I study him back. Somewhere outside, the first gulls are starting up, and the fridge hums, and I become aware that we’re sitting in a small pool of yellow light in a dark cottage like the last two people awake in the world, and that he smells like soap and something warmer under it, cedar maybe, and that this is absolutely not a useful observation at this juncture.

Focus, Marlowe. Turtles.

“Conditions,” Noah says finally, and I do not pump my fist, because I’m a professional. “I drive. We vary the route and the timing—dawn window, not dawn o’clock. I walk the beach first. You work where I put you, and if I say we’re leaving, we’re leaving. Mid-sentence. Mid-egg. Whatever.”