Page 34 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

“She’s stalling,” the voice says, mildly. “Sid. Make the timeline clear to her.”

Sid produces a knife with the theatrical reluctance of a man who’s mostly used it on fishing line, and the wet anchor in my chest drops another fathom, and this is the part I won’t be joking about later, the part where the salon goes airless and small and I understand that I am on dark water with frightened men and a voice that does short-term math.

“Sid,” the kid says. First word he’s spoken. It comes out cracked.

“Shut up, Bryce,” says Anchor Tattoo, which—Bryce. His henchman name is Bryce. Under the terror, some incorrigiblecorner of my brain files it next to the peeled hull decals underthis organization is in decline.

“I’m just saying she’s awitness,” Bryce says, to the room, to the phone, to nobody. “Federal. That’s a whole different—Marco said this was moving boxes?—”

“Bryce.”

The voice on the phone lets the little mutiny die out on its own, which is somehow scarier than shouting would have been. Patient people are the dangerous ones. Noah taught me that without meaning to, the same way he taught me everything without meaning to, and I hold his lessons against my chest like a flotation device and keep my eyes on the knife and my mouth ahead of the fear.

So I look at the knife, and I think about Noah’s hands steady on a coffee mug at 4:50 in the morning.You’re allowed to be scared. Scared’s rational.

Okay. Rational, then. Rational says: the beacon’s been live for over an hour. Rational says: the whole net knows, and there’s a man out there in the dark for whom this exact ocean is a first language.

Rational says: keep them managing your mouth.

“Timeline, sure, let’s talk timeline,” I say, and my voice only shakes on the first word. “Here’s mine. Loggerhead nests take sixty days. You have maybe eleven minutes.”

Sid blinks, knife drooping a degree. “What?”

“That’s my professional estimate. You took a federal witness off a beach that was under active protection. You know that thing where you drop cargo and mark the coordinates and come back later? They do that too, except the cargo isme, and the retrieval team is?—”

The engine note changes. The big one at the helm says something low and sharp. Every head turns to the stern, wherethe running lights show absolutely nothing, just black water and blacker sky.

Then the black water stands up and comes over the transom.

Here’s my honest sworn testimony about the next ninety seconds: it’s the only time all summer I ever saw Noah Vance the way the file must read.

He comes out of the dark already moving, wet to the waist, and the world goes very fast and very specific. Anchor Tattoo makes it half off the bench before he’s down—I don’t fully see how, it’s like watching weather happen to a person, a front moving through. Sid’s knife hand gets caught mid-air and redirected somewhere anatomy doesn’t recommend, and Sid makes a noise like a gull and joins his peas on the deck. The big one turns from the helm into a flashbang of white light and shouting as the task force boat comes up the port side out of nowhere, floodlights slamming on,FEDERAL AGENTS, HANDS, HANDS—and the kid, my larval-conscience kid, takes one look at all of it and sits down on the deck with his fingers laced behind his head like he’s been rehearsing.

And then it’s over. That’s the thing nobody tells you about the loudest minute of your life. It just—stops. Boots on deck, zip ties going onto other people’s wrists for a change, the voice on the phone long gone but the phone itself bagged as evidence, some federal agent already sayingchain of custodyin the pleased tone of a man whose eighteen months just paid off.

Noah cuts my hands free himself. His face, in the floodlight wash, is something I’ve never seen—the cold thing and the drowning thing occupying the same water, and both of themgoing out of him all at once as his hands close around my wrists, over the marks, gentle as a nest check.

“Hey, Doc.” Wrecked. Barely a voice at all. His thumbs move once across the marks on my wrists, back and forth, a man confirming a reading he doesn’t like. “Status.”

“Well,” I say, “I lectured them about staghorn recruitment until an armed maritime professional boarded the vessel, so, you know. Standard Tuesday.”

“Abby.”

“Eleven minutes. I told them eleven minutes, and you did it in nine, which is going to be a problem for my credibility as a?—”

“Abby.”

“I’m okay.” And then, because it’s him, because the floodlights are turning everything white and my hands won’t stop now that they’ve started, the rest of it comes out shaking. “I’m—they had a knife, Noah, and I kept doing the math on the swim and I couldn’t make it work, and I’m—I’m okay, I’m okay, I just really need you to?—”

He’s already doing it. He folds me into his chest right there in front of the entire federal government, one hand cradling the back of my head like I’m cargo beyond price, and I stop performing okay-ness into his soaked shirt and just shake, and he holds on, and the deck fills with agents stepping around us like we’re load-bearing.

“I’ve got you,” he says into my hair. Once. Twice. However many times it takes, in the voice with all the briefing gone out of it, only the man left. “I’ve got you. You held the mile.”

“We held it,” I manage, into the wet shirt, because credit matters even now. Especially now.

They wrap me in one of those foil blankets on the SHS boat—I look like a baked potato with a beacon, and no one will let me hold anything but Gatorade—and Noah runs us home slow, one hand on the wheel, one arm around his potato, my cheek against his chest where I can hear the engine of him running steady.

The radio’s a party line the whole way in. Rafi confirming Delgado’s awake and demanding a status report on me before he’ll accept a CT scan, the stubborn beautiful idiot. A federal agent asking Noah, in the careful tone of a man completing paperwork he doesn’t want to think too hard about, to characterize his “survey methodology.” Marnie, who is somehow on the SHS frequency, a mystery no one will ever solve or prosecute, announcing that the Salty Bean is open whenever we land, and that there’s a pot of the good chowder on, and that if anyone lets Abby see the state of her cottage before it’s been tidied, she will be speaking to that personpersonally.