Page 9 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“Mid-egg is not a real?—”

“Deal or no deal.”

“Deal.” I stick my hand across the table before he can add clauses. He looks at it, and then he takes it, and his hand is warm and rough and approximately the size of a dinner plate, and the handshake lasts one second longer than a handshake needs to, or maybe I imagine that, because at 5 AM the data gets unreliable.

“Drink your coffee,” he says. “You’ve got a temperature check.”

The drive takes eleven minutes instead of six, because varying the route apparently means treating my beach commute like a prisoner transfer. We go past the shrimp docks. We double back by the church. At one point we sit at a stop signfor a full fifteen seconds while he watches a sedan do absolutely nothing, and I narrate the whole thing under my breath like a golf announcer—and he’s checking the mirror again, folks, tremendous mirror discipline from the big man this morning—and he doesn’t tell me to stop, which I log as tacit approval and will be building on in future sessions.

Here is what I learn about Noah Vance on a beach at dawn: he makes the ocean look like it’s up to something.

He walks the tide line ahead of me while the sky goes from gray to shell-pink, and he reads the beach the way I read a reef—methodical, top to bottom, cataloging. He checks the dune line. He checks the pier pilings. He checks a piece of driftwood like it might have opinions. Then he plants himself uphill of nest 41 with his arms crossed and his back to the sunrise, facing the empty parking lot, which might be the single most depressing life choice I’ve ever witnessed.

“You’re missing it,” I tell him, kneeling at the nest with my probe and my clipboard.

“Missing what.”

“The entire sky.”

“I’ve seen it.”

“Not this one. This one’s new. They’re all new, that’s the whole point of skies.” The probe beeps and I log the reading—27.9 at datalogger depth, my beautiful shady outlier, holding steady. “You know, most people would consider this a perk of the job. Beach at sunrise. Some people pay resort prices for this.”

“Most people at a resort aren’t working a protection detail.”

“See, that’s your problem. You’re always on shift.” I sit back on my heels and look up at him, this large grim silhouetteagainst a sky doing watercolors behind his back. “When was your last vacation?”

Silence. But it’s a new kind of silence. It has math happening in it.

“You have to count,” I say, delighted. “Oh no. You’re counting.”

“Vacations are a staffing problem.”

“That’s—no. Vacations are ayouproblem. Rafi would give you time off. Rafi seems like he’d throw a parade if you asked for a Tuesday.” I flag the reading and move to the second logger. “Three years? Am I close?”

Nothing.

“More than three years.”

“Log your eggs, Doc.”

“That’s not a denial, Noah.”

He doesn’t answer, but when I glance up mid-measurement, he’s shifted. Quarter turn. Officially he’s now covering the northern approach, or whatever he’d call it if I asked.

Unofficially, the sunrise is in his peripheral vision, and he let it happen, and I decide to log that too, on the whiteboard in my head, under NOAH FACTS, number six:not actually immune. Just out of practice.

A pelican sails in low over the shallows, banks once, and lands on the lifeguard stand with the entitlement of a creature who has never paid rent. Big, scruffy, judgmental. My heart does a happy little maraca thing.

“Carl!” I call out. “You’re north today. Look at you. Expanding the portfolio.”

Carl ignores me magnificently.

“You know that’s not the same bird,” Noah says.

“You don’t know that.”

“They don’t have territories that?—”