Page 21 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“Right,” she says. “So just to update my files: it’s not day three anymore.”

“It is not day three,” I admit, and she has the decency not to scream this time. Mostly.

I keep waiting for the fight—the one where he demands I shrink my life down to a bunker, the one every version of this arrangement is supposed to arrive at. It’s circling. I can feel it circling; his jaw’s been load-bearing since breakfast. Whatever he gave the room this morning, it cost him, and men like Noah pay those bills somewhere private, later, alone.

But tonight there’s just the house settling, and his patrol—deadbolt, chain, kitchen window, front again—and then the pause outside my door. The verification pause. Four seconds, every night, the length of one slow breath, and then his weight moves off down the hall to a couch that’s six inches too short for him, in a living room glowing red for turtles that haven’t hatched.

And lying there in the dark with my heart going like a hatchling flipping sand, I run out of places to put it, so I just say it. To the ceiling. Silently. Like a hypothesis.

I’m falling for my bodyguard.

Ugh. Evensilentlyit sounds like the back of a paperback. I’m a scientist. I have a doctorate. I know exactly what this is—proximity effect, danger-adjacent adrenaline misattribution, the Capilano bridge study, I’ve read theliterature. Put two mammals in a small dwelling under threat conditions and the limbic system starts writing checks. It’s textbook. I’m smarter than this.

Through the wall: the creak of the couch. A long exhale. The small, human sound of a large man trying to fit himself onto furniture built for a smaller life, night after night, without one word of complaint, because the couch faces the door and the door is where I’d need him.

Yeah. I’m not smarter than this.

Chapter 8

Noah

The couch and I have reached an understanding: neither of us mentions the other’s limitations. I’m awake at 0530 anyway, which is how I’m the one who finds the note.

It’s on the front door. Not the mailbox, not the windshield. The door, eye level, one strip of tape, centered like whoever hung it took pride in the work. Which means somebody stood on this porch in the night, ten feet from where I slept, four steps from her bedroom window, long enough to center a piece of paper and smooth down a strip of tape. The porch board that creaks, second one, Mrs. Pruitt’s board, didn’t wake me.

That’s twice now they’ve told us they can reach. The car was a message to her.

This one’s addressed to me.

I read it once. Block letters, gloves-clean paper, no flourishes.

SHE TALKS TO EVERYONE. EVERYONE TALKS ABOUT HER. NESTS ARE EASY TO FIND. CALL OFF THE COAST GUARD OR THE NEXT VISIT ISN’T PAPER.

Nests. Plural, underlined once. They know her research sites. They know her schedule, because her schedule is the tide chart, because her whole shining life is posted on a whiteboard visiblefrom the kitchen window, because she is knowable—she has spent two months in this town making sure of it.

I bag the note. I photograph the tape, the door, the board that should have creaked. I wake Delgado’s relief on the radio and keep my voice at briefing flat while something old and cold comes up through me like water through a cracked hull.

Then I go inside and make coffee, because in forty minutes she’s going to come down the hall in a terrible t-shirt, talking before she’s fully through the door, and the world she wakes up into is going to have less summer in it. Forty minutes is what I can give her.

It’s not enough. It goes worse than the car.

“No,” she says.

“Abby.”

“You said that word to me my first week. Remember how it felt?” She’s got her arms crossed in the middle of the living room, note in its evidence bag on the table between us like a body. She read it twice, went white, went steady. Then I opened my mouth and put it wrong, and now we’re here. “I’m saying it back. No. I’m not leaving Sunbreak Harbor.”

“Task force can have you in a safe location by tonight. Orlando. Two weeks, maybe three, they roll up the network, you come back to your?—”

“Mywhat, Noah? My nests that hatch indays? My grant that ends in August whether or not I have data? My—” She points at the whiteboard, at the four colors of marker, hand not quite steady. “Sixty-one days of continuous monitoring. You don’t pause a dataset because some coward with a tape dispenser?—”

“This isn’t about the dataset.”

“It’s entirely about?—”

“They stood on your porch.” It comes out too loud. Not shouting. Worse: the cold thing, the operational thing, the voice I use when the plan is failing and someone’s going to bleed for it. “Ten feet from me, four from you, and I slept through it, and you want to discusscontinuous monitoring. They named your sites. Do you understand what you’re asking me to defend? A beach. A public beach, a mile of open sand, at night, because that’s when your turtles do their thing—you’re asking me to hold a mile of dark beach with a six-man rotation because you will not accept that the rational move is to not be here.”

“Then don’t defend it!” Her voice cracks straight down the middle. “Nobody’s making you hold anything—ask Rafi for a reassignment, go back to your boat where everything’s quiet and gray andmanageable?—”