Page 37 of Accidental Bodyguard Summer

I know it’s her before I’m off the couch. Nobody else knocks like that—bright, syncopated, a knock with a personality disorder. But I check the peephole anyway, old habit, and there she is, warped fisheye-wide, chin up, jaw set, holding a Tupperware container like a subpoena.

Behind her, across the hall, my neighbor’s door is cracked open. Mrs. Okafor. Retired dispatcher, sharp as tin snips, hasn’t said forty words to me in two years of nodding in the stairwell.

“He’s home,” Mrs. Okafor supplies, through the crack, helpfully. “Came in at half past eight. He takes the stairs.”

“Thank you, Adaeze,” Abby says, sweet as pie, eyes never leaving my peephole like she can see me through it. “That tracks with his patterns.”

Adaeze.Four days. It took her four days to flip my building. The woman could dismantle a smuggling network with a muffin basket and a clipboard, and I say that as the only person alive who has watched her do approximately that.

“Noah Vance,” she says, to the door, at a volume calibrated for me and the stairwell and possibly the historical record. “I have muffins, a fully cited argument, and nowhere to be untilnesting season ends. You of all people know I’ll stand here talking indefinitely. Ask Sid.”

Through the wood, quieter, just for me, in the voice she uses at nest checks when something fragile is about to make its run for the water: “Noah. It’s dinner on the rail, honey. You just have to row.”

Mrs. Pruitt. There are no secrets on this coast at all, and thank God for it.

I open the door.

Chapter 15

Abby

He opens the door, and my whole prepared argument—I had sections, I had transitions, I had acallback—takes one look at him and files out of my head in single file, holding its little briefcases.

He looks terrible. Terrible for Noah, which is to say perfect, obviously, the man could model for a lighthouse authority calendar. But there are new hollows under his eyes and he’s holding the door like it’s the last defensible position on the beach, and the apartment behind him is the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Beige. Bare. One couch, one lamp, zero art. A kit bag by the wall, packed, like he lives here the way you wait in a terminal.

Four days of scheduling-conflict texts, and I came loaded for a fight—a closing argument Priya pressure-tested over video call last night like the litigator she is. One look at the terminal he’s been boarding in for two years and I understand this was never a fight. It’s an extraction. You don’t argue a man off a sinking boat. You hold out your hand and you keep it steady.

“Hi,” I say. “I’m Abby. I don’t think we’ve met. I’m the woman you love, and you’re the idiot who’s been texting her like a dentist’s office.”

“That’s—” He stops. Regroups. I watch him consider and reject three defenses in the space of a breath, which I count as surrender on two fronts. “The muffins are a hostage exchange?”

“The muffins are a good-faith deposit. Keep up.”

Something crosses his face—pain and the laugh, fighting for the same ground. “Abby.”

“You get one speech.” I hold up the Tupperware. “I brought muffins for after. Blueberry. The good crumb. That’s how sure I am about how this ends. Go.”

He does it. I watch him square up to it like a man walking into weather, and out it comes, all of it, quiet and rehearsed-sounding, which breaks my heart the worst—that he’s been up nightsdraftingthis. The sunset on the beach. The buzz of the phone. How the decoy only works on a compromised man. That I nearly died because he was busy being happy, and that he’s done the math (he saysthe math, he actually says it) and the variables of him don’t sum to anything a person should have to build a life on. Broken. He uses the word broken, and he uses it the way he saidclearedin my kitchen that rainy night, a word gone smooth from handling.

He doesn’t pace while he says it. That’s the detail that guts me. He stands there at parade rest in his own sad living room and delivers it to a point just left of my eyes, the way you’d give testimony, and I realize he’s not trying to win. He’s trying to confess his way out of being loved. There’s a difference, and you can hear it, and I stand very still and let him get all the way to the end of it, because he sat through every one of my spirals all summer without once grabbing the wheel.

“You deserve someone who isn’t watching the door,” he finishes. “That’s the whole speech.”

“Okay.” I nod. I set the muffins down on his sad bare counter, and I set my phone beside them, face up, deliberate. “Also, procedural note: Adaeze is timing this. If I’m not out inan hour with good news, she’s coming in with a casserole and opinions, and neither of us can stop her, she raised four kids and dispatched for thirty years, she’s seen everything. Rebuttal.”

“Doc—”

“You had your turn.” I walk toward him and, credit where due, the man holds position. “One. The decoy worked on theentire federal task force, who I’ll note were not in love with me, so your theory of impairment has a control-group problem. Two. Compromised-you crossed eleven miles of open water in the dark, alone, and took a boat with four smugglers on it apart so efficiently that a man namedSidis still making noises. Rafi tells everyone. It’s basically a bedtime story at SHS now. Three.” My voice wobbles and I let it, because he should hear what it costs; he always paid me the same honesty. “You keep saying broken like it’s a classification I haven’t been briefed on. Noah. I read the whole file. Not Rafi’s version—yours, the one you gave me in my kitchen in the rain when you didn’t have to. I know exactly what I’m standing in front of. I did the peer review. And my finding, mypublished, citablefinding, is that the man who thinks he’s a wall is the softest thing on this entire coast, and I want him. Not the repaired version. Not after some maintenance period. Him. Watching the door, counting my words, all of it, now.”

“It’s not—” His jaw does the thing. His hands have come up to my arms, and I genuinely don’t think he knows, which is the whole man in one gesture. “Abby. Some part of me is always going to be standing in that hold.”

“I know.” I step in until there’s nothing between us but Tupperware physics. “So here’s my offer. Stand in it with the lights on. I’ll come find you every time. I’m loud, I’m impossible to lose, and I have never once in my life let go of anything I?—”

I don’t get to finish the sentence, which is fine.

I’ll finish it later. We have time.

He kisses me like a man coming up from depth—desperate first, then slower, then unbearably slow, his hands rising to frame my face like he does, like he’s holding a heading. When he finally pulls back an inch, his forehead against mine, his voice has sand in it.