Chapter 3
Abby
Living with a bodyguard, day three. Observations so far: he’s quiet, he’s enormous, and he folds his blanket every morning with corners so sharp you could file paperwork with them.
I keep a running list on the second whiteboard, the little one by the fridge, under the heading NOAH FACTS. Currently it reads:
He saw the list on day two. He read the whole thing, standing there with his coffee, and I braced for an objection, and what he said was, “Seven.”
“Seven what?”
“T-shirts.”
Then he walked away, and I updated the whiteboard, and something about the whole exchange made me suspect—for the first time since he’d walked into my cottage looking like a thundercloud in tactical pants—that there might be an actual person in there.
Here’s the thing, though. The novelty wore off around the time I realized he meant it about where you go, I go.
He came to the grocery store and cased the cereal aisle.
He came to Kayla’s soccer game and stood at the fence line, scanning the parking lot with his arms crossed, and half the parents asked me if he was a scout for a youth academy.
He walks me to Mrs. Pruitt’s fence like the eight feet of open lawn between our porches is a war zone.
And the turtles are suffering for it. Well.
Not suffering. The turtles are fine; the turtles are unaware of literally everything, which is their superpower.
But nest checks are supposed to happen on a schedule, and Noah treats every proposed departure from the cottage like I’ve asked him to escort me across enemy lines, with a planning cycle to match.
The loggerheads don’t have a planning cycle. They have biology.
Which is why it’s 4:50 in the morning, and I’m easing my bedroom door open in the dark with my field bag pre-packed and my sneakers in my hand, like a teenager sneaking out to a party, if the party were data collection.
“Okay, Abby,” I breathe, so quietly it’s basically a thought with air in it. “Stealth mode.”
The plan is simple. Out the back door, down the beach path, thirty minutes at nest 41 for the dawn temperature reading, back before he even wakes up.
What he doesn’t know can’t turn into a security briefing.
Besides, nobody’s dumping cargo on a beach at dawn, and if I take the path, I’m not even on a road, and I have thought about this from every angle for at least four minutes.
I make it two steps into the kitchen.
The overhead light snaps on.
Noah is sitting at my kitchen table. Fully dressed. Arms crossed. He has the stillness of a gargoyle and the expression of a disappointed parish priest, and there are two mugs of coffee on the table, one in front of the empty chair.
I clutch my sneakers to my chest and say, with tremendous dignity, “This isn’t what it looks like.”
“It’s 0450.”
“I sleepwalk.”
“With a packed field bag.”
“I’m a very organized sleepwalker.”
He doesn’t laugh. Obviously he doesn’t laugh, laughing costs him eleven dollars a word. But he nudges the second mug an inch toward the empty chair, and that’s how I know I’ve been made since before I got out of bed.
“How?” I sit. The coffee’s exactly how I like it, which is annoying, because it means he’s been cataloging me right back. “I was silent. I practiced the door.”
“Board outside your room creaks. You skipped it.” He wraps both hands around his mug. “So you loaded weight on the left. Which meant you were carrying the bag.”
“That’s genuinely creepy. You get that, right? That’s a creepy skill.”
“Dawn reading at the nest,” he says, ignoring this. “That’s the mission?”
“It’s not a mission, it’s a temperature check.
Look.” I pull the clipboard out of my bag, because if he wants a briefing, buddy, I will give him a briefing.
“Sand temperature determines sex ratios in loggerhead hatchlings. Warmer nests skew female. I’m tracking morning lows against my dataloggers because nest 41 is high on the beach, in the dune shade, and if my hypothesis is right, that one nest might be quietly producing half the males on this stretch of coast. This is the kind of data you can only get by being there.
At dawn. Consistently. It cannot wait for a threat assessment, because the eggs, and I need you to internalize this, do not know about the smugglers. ”
Somewhere in the middle of all that, I stood up. I don’t remember standing up. I’m holding the clipboard like a preacher holds a Bible, and Noah is looking up at me with his coffee halfway to his mouth and an expression I can’t read at all.
“No,” he says.
One word. One! I just gave him a whole TED talk.
“Noah.”
“You planned to leave, alone, in the dark, without telling me, on the exact route anybody watching this cottage would predict.” Still level. Still quiet. Somehow that’s worse. “The answer to that plan is no.”
“Okay, when you phrase it like that, it has a certain flavor, but—”
“There’s no but.”
“There’s always a but. Butts are load-bearing in my arguments.” I drop back into the chair and switch tactics, because bargaining is a science and I am a scientist. “Fine. Compromise. I go, you watch from the dunes with your scary binoculars.”
“No.”
“I go, and you stand directly next to me radiating disapproval.”
He considers that one for a second. Progress.
“I wear the SHELL YEAH shirt so any snipers know I’m not a threat—”
“Don’t,” he says, “joke about snipers at 0500,” and there’s a splinter of something under the flat tone, something that makes me put my mug down and actually look at him.
The gray light through the kitchen window catches the lines of his face, and it occurs to me—belatedly, because it’s early and because he makes it so easy to forget—that this man does this job because somewhere along the line, the worst version of it already happened to him.
“Sorry,” I say, and I mean it, and I let one whole beat of silence go by, which for me is basically a moment of silence lasting a fiscal quarter. “But I’m not negotiating about whether the readings happen. Just how.”
He studies me over the coffee. I study him back.
Somewhere outside, the first gulls are starting up, and the fridge hums, and I become aware that we’re sitting in a small pool of yellow light in a dark cottage like the last two people awake in the world, and that he smells like soap and something warmer under it, cedar maybe, and that this is absolutely not a useful observation at this juncture.
Focus, Marlowe. Turtles.
“Conditions,” Noah says finally, and I do not pump my fist, because I’m a professional. “I drive. We vary the route and the timing—dawn window, not dawn o’clock. I walk the beach first. You work where I put you, and if I say we’re leaving, we’re leaving. Mid-sentence. Mid-egg. Whatever.”
“Mid-egg is not a real—”
“Deal or no deal.”
“Deal.” I stick my hand across the table before he can add clauses.
He looks at it, and then he takes it, and his hand is warm and rough and approximately the size of a dinner plate, and the handshake lasts one second longer than a handshake needs to, or maybe I imagine that, because at 5 AM the data gets unreliable.
“Drink your coffee,” he says. “You’ve got a temperature check.”
The drive takes eleven minutes instead of six, because varying the route apparently means treating my beach commute like a prisoner transfer.
We go past the shrimp docks. We double back by the church.
At one point we sit at a stop sign for a full fifteen seconds while he watches a sedan do absolutely nothing, and I narrate the whole thing under my breath like a golf announcer—and he’s checking the mirror again, folks, tremendous mirror discipline from the big man this morning—and he doesn’t tell me to stop, which I log as tacit approval and will be building on in future sessions.
Here is what I learn about Noah Vance on a beach at dawn: he makes the ocean look like it’s up to something.
He walks the tide line ahead of me while the sky goes from gray to shell-pink, and he reads the beach the way I read a reef—methodical, top to bottom, cataloging.
He checks the dune line. He checks the pier pilings.
He checks a piece of driftwood like it might have opinions.
Then he plants himself uphill of nest 41 with his arms crossed and his back to the sunrise, facing the empty parking lot, which might be the single most depressing life choice I’ve ever witnessed.
“You’re missing it,” I tell him, kneeling at the nest with my probe and my clipboard.
“Missing what.”
“The entire sky.”
“I’ve seen it.”
“Not this one. This one’s new. They’re all new, that’s the whole point of skies.
” The probe beeps and I log the reading—27.
9 at datalogger depth, my beautiful shady outlier, holding steady.
“You know, most people would consider this a perk of the job. Beach at sunrise. Some people pay resort prices for this.”
“Most people at a resort aren’t working a protection detail.”
“See, that’s your problem. You’re always on shift.” I sit back on my heels and look up at him, this large grim silhouette against a sky doing watercolors behind his back. “When was your last vacation?”
Silence. But it’s a new kind of silence. It has math happening in it.
“You have to count,” I say, delighted. “Oh no. You’re counting.”
“Vacations are a staffing problem.”
“That’s—no. Vacations are a you problem. Rafi would give you time off. Rafi seems like he’d throw a parade if you asked for a Tuesday.” I flag the reading and move to the second logger. “Three years? Am I close?”
Nothing.
“More than three years.”
“Log your eggs, Doc.”
“That’s not a denial, Noah.”
He doesn’t answer, but when I glance up mid-measurement, he’s shifted. Quarter turn. Officially he’s now covering the northern approach, or whatever he’d call it if I asked.
Unofficially, the sunrise is in his peripheral vision, and he let it happen, and I decide to log that too, on the whiteboard in my head, under NOAH FACTS, number six: not actually immune. Just out of practice.
A pelican sails in low over the shallows, banks once, and lands on the lifeguard stand with the entitlement of a creature who has never paid rent. Big, scruffy, judgmental. My heart does a happy little maraca thing.
“Carl!” I call out. “You’re north today. Look at you. Expanding the portfolio.”
Carl ignores me magnificently.
“You know that’s not the same bird,” Noah says.
“You don’t know that.”
“They don’t have territories that—”
“Do you have documentation, Noah? Peer-reviewed literature? Or is this just a vibe you have about Carl?”
A pause. The waves fold and hiss. Two more pelicans drift past like commuters.
“Withdrawn,” he says.
And there—right there, for maybe half a second, while he’s looking at the dumbest bird in Florida so he doesn’t have to look at me—the corner of his mouth moves. Not a smile. A rumor of a smile. A place where a smile could someday be built, pending permits.
I bend over the datalogger so he can’t see my face, because I’m grinning like an idiot at a sand hole, and there’s no professional explanation for it.
“Back up,” Priya says. “He was already awake. With coffee. Made the way you like it.”
“That’s not the point of the story.”
“It’s the entire point of the story.”
I’m on the cottage porch with my phone, and Noah is inside doing something to the window locks that involves a drill, and Priya Nair—my best friend since we shared a dorm and a crippling fear of our stats professor—has extracted the last three days out of me in under four minutes.
She could work for the smugglers. She’d have the whole network flipped by lunch.
“The point of the story,” I say, “is that I successfully negotiated field access under a security protocol. It’s a professional victory.”
“Uh-huh. Describe him again.”
“I didn’t describe him a first time.”
“You said, quote, ’a thundercloud in tactical pants.’”
“That’s a threat assessment.”
“Abby.” I can hear her moving her toddler’s cup off a counter, twelve hundred miles away, multitasking my downfall.
“You’ve been in that town six weeks and you’ve already emotionally adopted a barista, a harbormaster, a produce guy, an eighty-year-old widow, and a seabird.
Now the government of your life has installed a large silent man in your living room, and you’re telling me about his forearms unprompted. ”
“I never mentioned his forearms.”
“You said he re-installed a deadbolt. That’s forearm content, and you know it.”
I open my mouth to deploy a counterargument and find the cupboard bare. On the other side of the wall, the drill whirs, stops, whirs. Through the front window I can see the back of Noah’s head, the set of his shoulders, the maddening competent economy of him.
“He counted my words on Monday,” I say instead, quieter. “I mean—I counted his. Eleven. And I keep thinking about how he pointed the sunrise into his peripheral vision like he wasn’t allowed to look straight at it. Priya, who taught him that? Who does that to a person?”
Priya’s quiet for a second. Even the toddler noise dims, like the whole household leaned in.
“Oh,” she says, gentle and thoroughly delighted. “Oh, you’re toast.”
“I’m not toast. It’s day three.”
“Day three,” she agrees, in the tone of a woman marking a calendar.
I get off the phone before she can start naming my children and lean my head back against the porch post. Inside, the drill stops. There’s a pause, and then Noah’s voice, low, through the screen door: “Your kitchen windows lock now. Both of them.”
“Thank you,” I call back, and I sit there in the morning heat, listening to him work on the house I live in, feeling weirdly, dangerously looked-after.
It’s day three, and I want to make the world’s most serious man smile on purpose. That’s it. That’s the whole project.
I’m a researcher. I know how these things start—one innocent question, and next thing you know it’s consumed your entire summer.