Page 19 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

Iwake up under the couch blanket three mornings in a row before I let myself do the math on it.

The math is simple. I fall asleep mid-documentary on my designated end of the couch. I wake up in my bed... no, that’s the fantasy version—I wake up on the couch, tucked under the blanket to the chin, popcorn bowl relocated to safety, laptop closed and squared with the coffee table edge, because everything he touches ends up parallel to something. Three mornings. Three data points. A trend line.

“It doesn’t mean anything,” I inform my toothbrush. “He’d tuck in a client shaped like a filing cabinet. It’s thermoregulation. It’sprotocol.”

The toothbrush has heard a lot of this lately. The toothbrush has heard about the almost-smiles and the decaf compliance and the way he saidthanks, Docinto the dark like it was being declassified. The toothbrush is the only member of my household who can’t testify, which is exactly why it gets the good material.

My toothbrush and I both know I’m lying. This is why I prefer talking to Carl. Carl never holds the record against me.

It’s Saturday, which means farmers market, which Noah has pre-approved with the enthusiasm of a man green-lighting his own root canal—crowds, two exits, vendor stalls with sight lines he already hates. I’ve promised Kayla I’ll be at her 9 AM game after. Orange slices are prepped. My hair is doing something structural today that I’ve decided to call intentional. I grab my keys off the hook, hip-check the screen door open, and get four steps down the shell path before I stop.

My car sits where it always sits, nosed up to the palmetto at the edge of the drive.

The passenger window is a spiderweb. Popped at the corner, sagging inward, a hole punched clean where the lock button used to matter. The glove box hangs open like a jaw. My field maps are fanned across the seat, my registration’s on the floor mat, and the little console organizer where I keep quarters and hair ties and a backup SD card?—

The SD card.

“Noah.” My voice comes out wrong, so I do it again, louder, and it comes out worse. “Noah.”

He’s there before the second syllable finishes—I never hear him cross a room, he just teleports with intent—and one hand closes on my shoulder and moves me, gently, physically, three feet to the left, so his body’s between me and the car. Between me and my own Subaru, which has never once been a threat, which has a WHALE HELLO THERE bumper sticker on it.

“Inside,” he says.

“That’s my?—”

“Now, Abby.”

He almost never uses my actual name. It scares me into the kitchen.

What follows is ninety minutes of my cottage turning into a precinct. Two sheriff’s deputies. Delgado from the perimeter team, who I’ve been feeding lemonade all summer and who won’t meet my eyes now, like the broken window is somehow his fault. Noah moving through all of it, low-voiced, flat, giving people vectors. Photographs of my glove box. A man dusting my dashboard while wearing gloves I’d use for hatchling handling.

I make coffee for everyone, because my hands need a job and it turns out you can’t fold a dish towel for ninety straight minutes. Mrs. Pruitt appears at the fence within the hour, ostensibly to water tomatoes she watered last night, actually to conduct oversight, and stays there the whole time like a one-woman civilian review board.

Here’s the inventory, when it’s done: they took nothing. Not the twenty-dollar bill in the console, not the dive computer in the door pocket, not my checkbook. They went through everything—every map, every logbook, the trunk, the first aid kit, unzipped, searched, re-zipped badly—and they took a four-year-old SD card that, I explain four separate times to four separate people, contains nothing but backup photos of sand.

“Sand,” the deputy repeats, writing it down like it might confess to something.

“Beach profile documentation. Erosion tracking. It’s—look, it’s scientifically valuable sand, but it’s sand.”

“They don’t know that,” Noah says, quiet, from the counter. First thing he’s said directly to me in an hour. “They’re not looking for what’s on it. They’re telling you they can reach what’s yours.”

The deputy gives him a look likewe don’t say that part to the victim, but here’s the thing about Noah Vance that I’ve had three weeks to learn: he will not lie to me, and it lands like a kindness even when it lands like a brick. The message was the registration on the floor mat.We know the car. We know the driveway. We know.

“Okay.” I set down the coffee pot. My voice does the wrong thing again, cracks a little on the next part, and I hate it. “Okay. Can somebody tell me the part where this stops? Because I did everything right. I reported it to the actual authorities, I took the video down, I’ve been sharing my house with a security detail, and they’re still—I counted eggs yesterday, that’s what I did yesterday, and these people put their hands on myerosion datalike?—”

The kitchen’s gone very quiet.

“Give us the room,” Noah says.

The deputies file out. Delgado files out. And I stand there vibrating in my stupid structural hair with my arms wrapped around myself, and Noah crosses the kitchen and stops in front of me, close enough that I have to tip my head back, and for a second I think—I don’t know what I think. That he’ll hand me a protocol. Assign me a vector.

“Hey.” Rougher than his briefing voice, lower. “You’re allowed to be scared. Scared’s rational. I’d worry if you weren’t.” A pause, and then, like a supply drop from a man who rations everything: “But nothing on this coast is getting through me to you. I need you to file that with the sand data. That one’s permanent.”

My eyes go hot. I file it. Permanently, probably, which is going to be a problem later, but that’s a later problem.

“Kayla’s game is at nine,” I say, wobbly.

“I know.” He’s already got his keys. “We’ll take the truck.”