Page 16 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

He has a shelf now. In my pantry. It happened organically: one row of protein bars, lined up like ammunition, chocolate flavor, always chocolate, a fact I found so bleak the first time I saw it that I almost cried into the cabinet. The man drinks candle-lattes when pushed. He eats two servings of vegetables when they’re handed to him. He is not, at the factory level, a chocolate-protein-bar man. He’s just been rationing himself for so long he’s forgotten it’s rationing.

The sticky notes live in my junk drawer. I take out the pad, and the Sharpie, and I have a whole committee meeting with myself about it, because there’s a line somewhere here between charming and deranged and I’d like to land on the right side of it.

“Keep it simple,” I advise myself. “Do not write a paragraph. Do not, under any circumstances, cite sources.”

I draft three on scrap paper first, because apparently this is a peer-reviewed sticky note now. Draft one is too long. Draft two is somehow longer than draft one, which is a personal record even for me. Draft three is a haiku, and I don’t know how that happened, and we will never speak of it.

On the first note I draw a fish. Round, smug, delighted—a fish with no natural predators and a good retirement plan. Next to it I write:smile more :). That one goes on the protein bars, dead center, where the ammunition lines up.

And then, because the porch is still sitting in my chest—eight words, level voice,there isn’t a longer version that helps anybody—I peel off a second note before the committee can adjourn.

You’re not a bad person.

No fish on that one. Some notes you don’t decorate.

I stick it underneath the first, flat against the box, where he’ll find it on his own time, and then I go to bed fast, like fleeing the scene of a kindness.

Lying there in the dark, listening to him come back in—deadbolt, chain, the pause that I now know is him checking the kitchen window, front lock again, order never varies—I stare at the ceiling and let myself wonder about him properly for the first time. The long version, not the file one. The one where somebody follows bad orders at twenty-something and spends the next decade converting himself into a wall, a lighthouse, a piece of security equipment with a heartbeat, because equipment doesn’t have to forgive itself.

His footsteps stop in the kitchen. Right about where the pantry is.

A long, long pause.

I pull the blanket over my grin and listen to absolutely nothing happen—no drawer, no trash lid, no note crumpling. Nothing. Which means they’re still on the box.

Which means he’s standing there reading them.

“Goodnight, Noah,” I call through the wall, because I have no self-control whatsoever.

A beat. Two.

“Goodnight, Doc.” And then, so quiet I nearly miss it, in a voice doing something I can’t see: “Nice fish.”

Chapter 6

Noah

Nice fish. That’s what I said. Standing in a dark kitchen at 2320, holding a box of protein bars like it might detonate, I read a note that saidyou’re not a bad person—a thing she cannot know, a thing she wrote anyway, in purple Sharpie, under a smug cartoon fish—and out of the entire English language I selectednice fish.

Eight years of debriefs. Statements to review boards. I’ve delivered casualty notifications, which is a sentence I don’t finish even in my own head. Words hold up fine under all of it.

One marine biologist with a sticky note pad, and the words just go.

The fish note stays on the box. It’s structural now; moving it would raise questions. The other one—the one with no drawing, because apparently even she knows some things you don’t decorate—I tell myself I’m throwing away, and instead it goes flat into the chest pocket of my kit bag, in the pouch with my spare compass, where important small things live so they don’t get lost.

I’m aware of what that means. Awareness of a problem, they teach you, is the first step to managing it.

They teach you wrong.

Sunday, Mrs. Pruitt gets dizzy.

I hear about it the way I hear about everything now—through the Abby network, which outruns official channels by a full news cycle. Her phone chimes, she reads it walking, and by the time she’s said “oh no” out loud she’s already got the freezer open and a burner lit and her sneakers half on, issuing me the world’s most cheerful operational order: “Grab the bread on the counter, we’re deploying.”

Nothing dramatic—a heat thing, a skipped-lunch thing, but her daughter in Tampa calls Abby in a panic because Mrs. Pruitt mentioned it on the phone the way old Florida women mention mortal peril, in passing, between tomato updates. And Abby’s out the door with a pot of soup inside forty minutes, because there was already soup in our freezer, labeled MRS. P (EMERGENCY), dated, like a fire extinguisher made of chicken and rice.

Protocol says I clear the house. So I clear it: kitchen, hall, sitting room dense with fifty years of photographs, Harold at every age looking like trouble in a collared shirt. And then protocol runs out and I stand at the window doing overwatch on a tomato garden while, behind me, Abby does the thing I still don’t have a word for.

She doesn’t nurse. Doesn’t hover. She sets up in Mrs. Pruitt’s kitchen like she’s the one who needs company—narrating the soup reheat, botching the location of every utensil until Mrs. Pruitt is out of her chair directing traffic, colorized with indignation, dizzy spell forgotten. It’s a con. It’s a beautiful con. Twenty minutes in, Mrs. Pruitt is eating soup without ever beingtold to eat soup, mid-story about Harold and a bar bet in Key West in 1968 involving a stolen mounted swordfish.