Page 29 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

What changes is the space between things. He touches me now like it’s allowed, because it is—a hand at the small of my back through a doorway, my ponytail tugged once, gently, when I lecture past the point of usefulness. At the Salty Bean he orders one lavender latte and one black drip, and Marnie takes in theoneof us we’ve clearly become, sets both cups down, and says, “Well, thank God. The whole town had money on it. Gus is going to be insufferable, he had this week.”

“The whole townbeton?—”

“Honey.” She pats my hand. “You introduced him as your bodyguard at a soccer game. You installed him at Flamingo Bingo. There are elderly women on this harbor who own binoculars, and you two have been the best show on the coast since the Fourth of July fireworks barge caught fire.”

Noah, beside me, wearing his flattest and most professional face, picks up his black drip and says, “Which week did Mrs. Pruitt have?”

“This one,” Marnie admits.

“She would,” he says, with something suspiciously like family pride, and I get to watch the entire coffee shop absorb the fact that the wall makes jokes now.

The days go like that. Golden and specific. Nest 41 starts showing signs—a slight depression in the sand, the caving that means the hatch is coming inside a week—and I file my mid-season report and Renata emails back one line,task force says soon, hold tight, with a smiley face, Renata-code for actual optimism. Noah teaches me to read the water off the point, rip lines and bait balls and the shadow that’s a reef and the shadow that isn’t. I teach him that key lime pie is a food group and that Carl will catch thrown bait shrimp with a majesty that borders on aerospace engineering. He denies the majesty. He throws the shrimp again.

The hatch-watch schedule goes up on the community board at the Salty Bean, because nest 41 is town property now, emotionally speaking. The retirees organize themselves into shifts with a shared calendar and a phone tree—“the girls,” Captain Lou calls them, though the girls include Walt—and Mrs. Pruitt appoints herself quality control. Somebody donates folding chairs. Marnie invents a thermos-only decaf policy for the beach crew, since white light disorients hatchlings and apparently so does Deb after nine p.m. I stand in front of the sign-up sheet with my chest doing complicated things, because I came here in May with a grant, a kayak, and a plan to leave in August, and somehow what I actually built was this.

“Your volunteers have a phone tree,” Noah says, reading over my shoulder.

“I know.”

“Rafi doesn’t have a phone tree this good.”

“Iknow,” I say, and if my voice is wet, the barometric pressure can take the blame.

Priya video-calls Thursday, takes one look at my face, and screams so loud her toddler starts screaming from another room, in solidarity, uninformed.

“TOAST,” she yells. “I said day three! I want it minuted!”

“It’s minuted. It’s on a whiteboard, actually, which—long story.”

“I have time. I have wine. Rohan took the baby to his mother’s.” She settles in against her kitchen counter with the focus she usually saves for closing arguments. “Begin at the rain.”

I begin at the rain. I tell it responsibly—I’m a professional, some data stays embargoed—but she’s Priya, she reads between every line I redact, and when I get to the part about my sticky notes riding around in hiskit bag pouch, she puts down her wine and presses her hand flat to her chest like she’s containing something structural.

“The compass pouch, Abby.”

“I know.”

“Where theimportant small things live.”

“I KNOW.”

“Okay.” She picks the wine back up, dabs her eye with her sleeve, and recovers her deposition face. “Continue. And do not skip the parts you’re planning to skip; I know your narrative editing, you go fast through the good feelings like they’re going to charge you a fee.”

That’s the thing about a best friend of eleven years: the woman has my whole source code. So I slow down and I tell it right—the coffee two mornings running, the way he saysDocnow, low, like an endearment with clearance, the whole terrifying miracle of being fully seen by the most observant man on the Gulf Coast and not once wanting to hide.

“You know what I love most,” Priya says, when I run dry. “Weeks of you trying to make that man smile like it was your dissertation. And it turns out the whole time, he was keeping receipts ofyou.”

“I contain the receipts,” I agree, wobbly.

“You’re both receipts.” She raises her glass to the camera. “To the wall and the hurricane. God help that little town.”

I haven’t said the load-bearing words to him yet, for the record. Gus doesn’t count; Gus was a security breach. There’s no protocol after this, Noah told me, and we’re both out here without one, learning the water as we go, and some soundings you take slowly.

Saturday evening we do the sunset check on 41 together, and the beach performs like it’s been paid.

Low tide, gold light thick as syrup, the sand still storm-packed and rippled. I’m kneeling at the nest with my probe while Noah stands his usual overwatch, except his usual has amended itself—he stands where his shadow keeps the sun off my work now. He thinks I haven’t noticed. I’ve noticed. I notice everything about him lately; the cataloging, it turns out, is contagious.

The readings are perfect. Cavity’s progressing. “Days,” I tell him, sitting back on my heels, sandy to the elbows. “Days, Noah. Eighty-plus little idiots are going to come boiling out of this hole and sprint for the surf like tiny drunk windup toys, and it’s the best thing you’ll ever see, and you’re going to cry.”