Page 10 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“Do you have documentation, Noah? Peer-reviewed literature? Or is this just a vibe you have about Carl?”

A pause. The waves fold and hiss. Two more pelicans drift past like commuters.

“Withdrawn,” he says.

And there—right there, for maybe half a second, while he’s looking at the dumbest bird in Florida so he doesn’t have to look at me—the corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. A rumor of a smile. A place where a smile could someday be built, pending permits.

I bend over the datalogger so he can’t see my face, because I’m grinning like an idiot at a sand hole, and there’s no professional explanation for it.

“Back up,” Priya says. “He was already awake. With coffee. Made the way you like it.”

“That’s not the point of the story.”

“It’s the entire point of the story.”

I’m on the cottage porch with my phone, and Noah is inside doing something to the window locks that involves a drill, and Priya Nair—my best friend since we shared a dorm and a crippling fear of our stats professor—has extracted the last three days out of me in under four minutes. She could work for the smugglers. She’d have the whole network flipped by lunch.

“The point of the story,” I say, “is that I successfully negotiated field access under a security protocol. It’s a professional victory.”

“Uh-huh. Describe him again.”

“I didn’t describe him a first time.”

“You said, quote, ’a thundercloud in tactical pants.’”

“That’s a threat assessment.”

“Abby.” I can hear her moving her toddler’s cup off a counter, twelve hundred miles away, multitasking my downfall. “You’ve been in that town six weeks and you’ve already emotionally adopted a barista, a harbormaster, a produce guy, an eighty-year-old widow, and a seabird. Now the government of your life has installed a large silent man in your living room, and you’re telling me about his forearms unprompted.”

“I never mentioned his forearms.”

“You said he re-installed a deadbolt. That’s forearm content, and you know it.”

I open my mouth to deploy a counterargument and find the cupboard bare. On the other side of the wall, the drill whirs, stops, whirs. Through the front window I can see the back of Noah’s head, the set of his shoulders, the maddening competent economy of him.

“He counted my words on Monday,” I say instead, quieter. “I mean—I counted his. Eleven. And I keep thinking about how he pointed the sunrise into his peripheral vision like he wasn’t allowed to look straight at it. Priya, who taught him that? Who does that to a person?”

Priya’s quiet for a second. Even the toddler noise dims, like the whole household leaned in.

“Oh,” she says, gentle and thoroughly delighted. “Oh, you’re toast.”

“I’m not toast. It’s day three.”

“Day three,” she agrees, in the tone of a woman marking a calendar.

I get off the phone before she can start naming my children and lean my head back against the porch post. Inside, the drill stops. There’s a pause, and then Noah’s voice, low, through the screen door: “Your kitchen windows lock now. Both of them.”

“Thank you,” I call back, and I sit there in the morning heat, listening to him work on the house I live in, feeling weirdly, dangerously looked-after.

It’s day three, and I want to make the world’s most serious man smile on purpose. That’s it. That’s the whole project.

I’m a researcher. I know how these things start—one innocent question, and next thing you know it’s consumed your entire summer.

Chapter 4

Noah

One innocent question. That’s how she operates. I’ve watched it for a week now, and I still can’t find the seam in it.