Page 11 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

Tuesday, on the pier, she asks a charter captain one innocent question about his catch, and nine minutes later the man is telling her about his knee replacement and offering to run her out to her far study site for free. Wednesday, it’s a nine-year-old with a sand bucket, and by the time I’ve cleared the family as tourists from Ohio, Abby has the kid holding a datalogger, deputized into science. She gives the parents a pamphlet. She gives everyone pamphlets. She keeps them in her field bag next to the emergency snacks, and the emergency snacks are also for distribution, because apparently strangers get hungry and that’s her department.

I ran protection for a senator who worked rope lines for a living. He’d shake forty hands in ten minutes and forget every one of them before the car door shut.

Abby remembers the knee replacement guy’s dog’s name. Biscuit. She asked after Biscuit’s hip dysplasia on Thursday, unprompted, and Captain Lou looked like a man who’d been handed a folded flag. Then he offered to teach her to throwa cast net, and now that’s on the whiteboard too, penciled in for August, color-coded under RECREATION, a category she created, as far as I can tell, entirely to spite me.

The security implication—the one I keep filing and re-filing—is that my principal’s threat surface isn’t a cottage and a beach. It’s a town. She’s grown into the place like mangrove root, and every friendly interaction is another node I can’t control, another stranger with her schedule, another door she’d walk through smiling. The textbook says minimize the pattern. Her pattern has a book club in it.

The textbook never met her. Neither did the network, and some days I think that’s the only advantage I’ve got.

Thursday morning she’s working the nest by the pier—full sun, tide going out, four hours of thick beach traffic ahead of us—and I’m standing where I always stand, uphill, back to the water, reading the parking lot. Two teenagers on the pier keep leaning over the rail to point at dolphins. A jogger’s on her third lap, consistent splits. Nothing pings.

A middle-aged couple in matching visors drifts over, cameras out. They watch Abby work for a minute, and then the wife stage-whispers, the way tourists do, like the beach is a museum: “Is that a real scientist?”

“She is,” I say, because sometimes answering ends it faster.

“And you’re her...” The husband looks at me. At the stance. Does the math his whole face shows. “Security?”

Before I can shape something bland, Abby’s up on her knees in the sand, shading her eyes, beaming.

“Yes! He’s my bodyguard.” She says it with the same cheer other people saythis is my husband, Greg. “Isn’t he great? He swept the beach this morning. You’re actually standing in a secured area, congratulations.” And while the couple stands there processing that, she hits them with a pamphlet each. “Do you know about our loggerheads?”

They did not. They do now. They leave fifteen minutes later with sunscreen recommendations, the hatchling release schedule, and instructions to tell their condo association about turtle-safe lighting, and the wife hugs her. Hugs her. Full contact, unvetted.

“You can’t announce me as your bodyguard,” I tell her when they’re out of earshot.

“Why not? You are. You’d rather I say what, personal cloud?”

“Low profile means low profile.”

“Noah.” She sits back on her heels and looks up at me, sand on her knees, sand on her chin, somehow. “You stand like a Roman statue that got assigned to a beach. You wear boots. On sand. In June. Everyone on this beach has already clocked you; the only mystery is whether you’re a bodyguard or my extremely intense boyfriend, and honestly the pamphlets go better with bodyguard.”

I don’t have a comeback for that, which she registers with visible satisfaction before going back to her eggs.

The jogger starts lap four. Splits still consistent. I file it and move on.

At 0930 she calls a hydration break and plants herself in the sand beside my position, uninvited, passing me a water bottle with a turtle sticker on it. Down the beach, a kid’s losing a kite fight. The tide’s turning.

“Question,” she says. “The pants.”

“What about the pants.”

“It’s ninety-one degrees, Noah. Feels like a hundred and four. Everyone on this beach is dressed like a beach, and you’re dressed like the third act of a movie. There are breathable fabrics now. There’s this whole invention, shorts?—”

“Pockets,” I say.

She waits. I leave it there, because the full answer—that I’m carrying a med kit, two phones, a multitool, and other items onmy person that beach shorts don’t accommodate—isn’t beach conversation. She squints at me for a long second, then nods slowly, like I’ve confirmed something.

“Tactical reasons. Everything’s tactical reasons. If I asked you why you part your hair on the left, you’d say sight lines.” She takes her bottle back. “One day I’m going to ask you a question and the answer’s going to be ’no reason, I just like it,’ and I’m going to have a heart attack and die, and you’ll have to explain that to Rafi. Tactically.”

She goes back to her nest. I stand there thinking about it longer than I mean to. There’s gear in every pocket of these pants, that’s true.

It’s also true that I’ve owned shorts for years, and it never once occurred to me I was allowed to be comfortable on shift.

Rafi calls at noon while Abby’s rinsing gear at the beach shower.

“Task force update,” he says. “You want the good news or the interesting news?”

“You know I don’t.”