Chapter 7
Abby
Iwake up under the couch blanket three mornings in a row before I let myself do the math on it.
The math is simple. I fall asleep mid-documentary on my designated end of the couch.
I wake up in my bed... no, that’s the fantasy version—I wake up on the couch, tucked under the blanket to the chin, popcorn bowl relocated to safety, laptop closed and squared with the coffee table edge, because everything he touches ends up parallel to something.
Three mornings. Three data points. A trend line.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” I inform my toothbrush. “He’d tuck in a client shaped like a filing cabinet. It’s thermoregulation. It’s protocol.”
The toothbrush has heard a lot of this lately.
The toothbrush has heard about the almost-smiles and the decaf compliance and the way he said thanks, Doc into the dark like it was being declassified.
The toothbrush is the only member of my household who can’t testify, which is exactly why it gets the good material.
My toothbrush and I both know I’m lying. This is why I prefer talking to Carl. Carl never holds the record against me.
It’s Saturday, which means farmers market, which Noah has pre-approved with the enthusiasm of a man green-lighting his own root canal—crowds, two exits, vendor stalls with sight lines he already hates.
I’ve promised Kayla I’ll be at her 9 AM game after.
Orange slices are prepped. My hair is doing something structural today that I’ve decided to call intentional.
I grab my keys off the hook, hip-check the screen door open, and get four steps down the shell path before I stop.
My car sits where it always sits, nosed up to the palmetto at the edge of the drive.
The passenger window is a spiderweb. Popped at the corner, sagging inward, a hole punched clean where the lock button used to matter.
The glove box hangs open like a jaw. My field maps are fanned across the seat, my registration’s on the floor mat, and the little console organizer where I keep quarters and hair ties and a backup SD card—
The SD card.
“Noah.” My voice comes out wrong, so I do it again, louder, and it comes out worse. “Noah.”
He’s there before the second syllable finishes—I never hear him cross a room, he just teleports with intent—and one hand closes on my shoulder and moves me, gently, physically, three feet to the left, so his body’s between me and the car.
Between me and my own Subaru, which has never once been a threat, which has a WHALE HELLO THERE bumper sticker on it.
“Inside,” he says.
“That’s my—”
“Now, Abby.”
He almost never uses my actual name. It scares me into the kitchen.
What follows is ninety minutes of my cottage turning into a precinct.
Two sheriff’s deputies. Delgado from the perimeter team, who I’ve been feeding lemonade all summer and who won’t meet my eyes now, like the broken window is somehow his fault.
Noah moving through all of it, low-voiced, flat, giving people vectors.
Photographs of my glove box. A man dusting my dashboard while wearing gloves I’d use for hatchling handling.
I make coffee for everyone, because my hands need a job and it turns out you can’t fold a dish towel for ninety straight minutes.
Mrs. Pruitt appears at the fence within the hour, ostensibly to water tomatoes she watered last night, actually to conduct oversight, and stays there the whole time like a one-woman civilian review board.
Here’s the inventory, when it’s done: they took nothing.
Not the twenty-dollar bill in the console, not the dive computer in the door pocket, not my checkbook.
They went through everything—every map, every logbook, the trunk, the first aid kit, unzipped, searched, re-zipped badly—and they took a four-year-old SD card that, I explain four separate times to four separate people, contains nothing but backup photos of sand.
“Sand,” the deputy repeats, writing it down like it might confess to something.
“Beach profile documentation. Erosion tracking. It’s—look, it’s scientifically valuable sand, but it’s sand.”
“They don’t know that,” Noah says, quiet, from the counter. First thing he’s said directly to me in an hour. “They’re not looking for what’s on it. They’re telling you they can reach what’s yours.”
The deputy gives him a look like we don’t say that part to the victim, but here’s the thing about Noah Vance that I’ve had three weeks to learn: he will not lie to me, and it lands like a kindness even when it lands like a brick.
The message was the registration on the floor mat.
We know the car. We know the driveway. We know.
“Okay.” I set down the coffee pot. My voice does the wrong thing again, cracks a little on the next part, and I hate it.
“Okay. Can somebody tell me the part where this stops? Because I did everything right. I reported it to the actual authorities, I took the video down, I’ve been sharing my house with a security detail, and they’re still—I counted eggs yesterday, that’s what I did yesterday, and these people put their hands on my erosion data like—”
The kitchen’s gone very quiet.
“Give us the room,” Noah says.
The deputies file out. Delgado files out.
And I stand there vibrating in my stupid structural hair with my arms wrapped around myself, and Noah crosses the kitchen and stops in front of me, close enough that I have to tip my head back, and for a second I think—I don’t know what I think.
That he’ll hand me a protocol. Assign me a vector.
“Hey.” Rougher than his briefing voice, lower.
“You’re allowed to be scared. Scared’s rational.
I’d worry if you weren’t.” A pause, and then, like a supply drop from a man who rations everything: “But nothing on this coast is getting through me to you. I need you to file that with the sand data. That one’s permanent. ”
My eyes go hot. I file it. Permanently, probably, which is going to be a problem later, but that’s a later problem.
“Kayla’s game is at nine,” I say, wobbly.
“I know.” He’s already got his keys. “We’ll take the truck.”
On the way out, Delgado’s waiting by the porch steps with his hat literally in his hands, which I didn’t know people still did.
“Dr. Marlowe. The car was on my watch rotation, and I want to say—”
“Delgado. Hector.” I take his arm before the apology can build structure.
“You watch a tree line all night, every night, in bug season, for a woman you’d never met before June.
The car was forty feet from the road on the far side.
Noah says whoever did it timed the patrol gap to the minute, which means they’re professionals, which means the only thing you could’ve done differently is be four people.
” I hold up the thermos I grabbed on the way out the door, because my hands needed a job and the job is always beverages.
“Lemonade’s a different recipe today. There’s ginger in it. It’s my angry batch.”
He takes the thermos like a medal he’s not sure he’s earned. Behind me, I hear Noah exhale through his nose—his version of an eye roll, or possibly his version of a hug; the dialect is contextual—and mutter something to Delgado that sounds like don’t fight it, it’s faster to drink the lemonade.
The angry batch is good, for the record. Rage improves citrus. That’s just science. Ask anyone on my perimeter.
We go to the game.
I don’t fully register how enormous that is until we’re standing at the field—ninety minutes after a criminal network searched my car, and Noah Vance is holding my orange slices. Both hands. Tupperware straight and level, like the slices are classified.
“You didn’t argue,” I say, watching the teams warm up, seven-year-olds orbiting the ball like electrons. “About coming here. I had a whole speech loaded and you just... got the truck.”
“You made a commitment to a left defender.” He scans the parking lot, the tree line, the concession stand, and comes back to me.
“And the network doesn’t move on a crowded field full of witnesses at nine in the morning.
This is the safest you’ll be all day.” A beat.
“The speech would’ve been good, though.”
“It had three sections and a callback.”
“Save it. You’ll need material later.”
Kayla spots us from the huddle and waves with her entire body, then points us out to her teammates with what can only be described as pride of ownership—that’s my scientist and her bodyguard—and six tiny defenders turn and wave at Noah, specifically Noah, who is apparently famous in the under-eight community as The Guy From The Beach Who Watches Everything.
He lifts one hand. Six children lose their minds.
The game is an eleven-to-two massacre. Kayla plays the second half with her cleats on the wrong feet and still takes out two forwards, legally, mostly.
I scream myself hoarse. Gus works the sideline like a lobbyist, and at halftime he puts a hand on my shoulder, nods at Noah, who is distributing orange slices to the team with the solemnity of a man arming a patrol, and says, “Your young man can stand watch over my marina anytime.”
I don’t correct the my. I notice I don’t correct it. Gus notices me notice, because he’s Gus, and he squeezes my shoulder once and mercifully lets it lie.
That’s the part I keep turning over that night, lying in bed, listening to the cottage tick and hum around Noah’s footsteps. Not the broken window. The orange slices.
The town finds out by noon, because the town finds out everything by noon.
By two, my porch looks like a potluck with a security clearance.
Marnie sends a tray of coffees out with her nephew, plus a bag of day-olds and a note that says for the officers, and the good ones are for you, you know which ones.
Miguel appears with mangoes, “for stress.” Gus drives by twice, slow, in the manner of a man conducting his own independent patrol, and the second time he leaves a hand-drawn map on the windshield of Noah’s truck marked with every boat ramp within ten miles and a note that says CALL IF YOU WANT EYES, GUS.
“Your town is interfering with a federal investigation,” Noah says, reading the map at the kitchen table. He says it in his flattest voice, which I’ve learned is the voice that’s covering for something.
“My town is casserole-ing a federal investigation. It’s different.” I look over his shoulder. Gus has annotated the tricky shoals by hand. “Are you going to call him?”
He’s quiet for a second, thumb moving over the corner of the map, and when he answers he sounds like a man conceding a chess position. “Ramp four’s the one I’d use, if I were them. He’s got it starred.”
Gus gets a call that evening. He shows up at the fence line with binoculars and a thermos before dark, and he and Delgado split the water view like they’ve worked together for years, and I stand at the kitchen window watching my harbormaster and my bodyguard’s perimeter man coordinate over lemonade, and something in my chest does a thing that has no business being this warm on a day my car got burgled.
They came at me through what’s mine. They keep not understanding what that actually is.
Priya calls at nine, because Delgado’s incident report apparently travels faster than light—no, because I texted her from the precinct-formerly-known-as-my-kitchen, and she’s been pacing her house ever since, waiting for a decent hour that she then doesn’t wait for.
“Okay, first: are you okay. Second: I looked at flights.”
“I’m okay. Do not get on a flight, you have a toddler and a defense to prep.”
“The toddler travels. The defense is basically done. Abby.” Her voice drops out of triage mode into the register that’s just Priya, my Priya, thesis-crisis Priya. “Someone broke into your car. I need you to be a person about this for one minute instead of a press release.”
So I’m a person about it for one minute.
Possibly three. I tell her about the SD card and the registration on the floor mat and the way my voice keeps doing the cracking thing at inconvenient moments, and she doesn’t say come home, which is why I love her, because she knows this is home now, two months or not.
What she says is: “And the wall? How’s he handling it?”
“He gave me a permanent guarantee and then took me to a soccer game.”
A pause. I can hear her recalibrating twelve hundred miles away.
“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. Even silently it 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 the literature.
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.