3. Saoirse
SAOIRSE
He leaves a note when he goes to the lobby.
It is, objectively, the least romantic note ever committed to paper. I have read it the way other women read love letters. There is something deeply wrong with me, and his name is Lachlan Burke.
He comes back at seven-fifteen.
He doesn’t comment on the shirt. He goes to the fridge, takes out eggs, and starts breakfast. I stand at the counter with my coffee and watch him move through the kitchen and I am in significant trouble if this contract lasts much longer.
“Did anything happen?” I ask.
“No.”
“It’s been six days,” I say. “No contact from whoever sent the threats. Nothing.” I look at the back of his head. “Could be a hoax.”
“Could be.”
“Does that change anything? Your protocols?”
“No.” He cracks an egg. “A threat is a threat until it isn’t.”
“That’s very definitive.”
“Yes.” He looks over his shoulder. “Eat.”
I eat.
The days settle into a shape.
Morning check-in. Breakfast, his—he cooks every day, and not badly, and I’ve stopped pretending I don’t like it.
Work on my laptop while he does his assessments or reads reports or sometimes nothing at all—just sits in the armchair and watches the street, which sounds boring and isn’t, because I cannot stop watching him when he does it.
He has the stillness of someone who was trained to wait for very long periods and never got untrained. Mountains are less patient than Lachlan Burke.
Evenings are ours. That’s not explicit—he doesn’t give me the evening the way he gives me a rule.
It just happens. After dinner, after the ten PM window we’re both aware of, there’s an hour or two where neither of us is performing our daytime version of this.
He reads. I watch things on my laptop. Sometimes we talk.
Sometimes the silence is so comfortable it startles me.
I keep waiting to get bored. I keep not getting bored.
It’s the most alarming thing that’s ever happened to me, and I grew up on military bases.
I’ve been thinking about comfortable silences.
About how rare they are. About how in every relationship I’ve had I’ve filled silence like it was something broken that needed fixing, because the men I was with required entertainment to stay interested.
With Lachlan the quiet doesn’t need filling. The quiet is its own presence.
On day seven he says, from his armchair: “You’re thinking loudly.”
“Am I.”
“Yes.”
“What am I thinking about?”
He looks over at me. “You’re trying to figure out if this is real or if it’s the situation.”
I put my laptop down.
“And?” I say.
“It’s both,” he says. “Most things are.”
I go back to my laptop. He goes back to his book. I’m thinking about what both means coming from a man who says approximately eighteen words a day, and I’m pretty sure it’s not a small thing.
I wake up at one-thirty AM to the sound of the front door.
Not the crash of it. The quiet of someone trying not to make sound. My brain files it before I’m fully awake: wrong kind of quiet. Different from the note-on-the-counter quiet, different from the building-settling quiet. Someone is trying to be subtle and not quite managing it.
I hear Lachlan move.
I barely hear him move. He’s been sleeping on the other half of my bed since day four—his idea, not mine, though I would have asked eventually—and the sound of him getting up is almost nothing.
Almost. The bed adjusts, my brain registers the absence of his heat, and then he’s gone and the apartment is very quiet in a different way.
I sit up.
He said: if I say run, you run. He also said: if anything happens, stay behind him.
I wait.
Sixty seconds of nothing. Then: a sound from the hall, the crunch of someone who hit the wrong spot on the floor, and then—not silence. Something else. Brief, and definitive, and then nothing.
The bedroom door opens.
“Saoirse.” Lachlan. His voice is exactly the same as it is at breakfast. “You’re all right. Stay in the room.”
“What—“
“Stay in the room.”
I stay in the room.
Four minutes. Then he appears in the doorway, six-five and completely composed. He looks at me on the bed in the dark and says: “Building security has him. Police are on the way. It’s handled.”
“Who—“
“One man. Armed but not tactically trained.” He crosses the room, sits on the edge of the bed.
Barefoot, t-shirt—the fabric pulled across those shoulders in the dark, nothing below it but the cargo pants he sleeps in.
The silver at his temples catches what light there is.
His hands are completely steady. “You’re safe. ”
“You—what did you do?”
“What needed doing.” He looks at me. In the dark his steadiness is visible—not calm, exactly, but the thing beyond calm. The thing that’s left after you’ve stripped out the part that reacts to fear. “No one is touching you. I want to be clear about that.”
“You could have been hurt.”
“I wasn’t.”
“But you?—“
“Saoirse.” His voice drops. “Look at me.”
I look at him.
“Nothing touches you,” he says. “That’s not a protocol. That’s not a rule I’m following because your father hired me.” He pauses. Long enough that I understand the pause. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I understand what he’s saying. I’ve spent four days watching him learn my apartment, memorize my routine, note every detail of my life like it’s something he was assigned to protect.
I’ve spent four days thinking it’s his job and it is his job.
But the way he’s looking at me right now is not a job face.
“Daddy,” I say.
It comes out differently than it has before. Not a test. Not deliberate. Something that just falls out of me because he’s sitting on the edge of my bed at two AM telling me nothing will touch me and my whole chest is undone with it.
He goes very still.
“I’m here,” he says. Quiet. “Nothing happened. Nothing is going to happen.”
He reaches out and puts his hand on the back of my neck—large and warm, steadying. I lean into it the way you lean into a wall when your legs are unreliable.
“I know,” I say. “Daddy. I know.”
He pulls me forward. Puts his arms around me and holds me against his chest and his heartbeat is not completely steady. A little faster than its resting rate. Not much. Not enough to see. But it’s there.
He was scared. Not for himself. For me.
I close my eyes and breathe him in.
“I’m going to keep you so safe,” he says. Into my hair. “That’s not the job anymore. It’s—“ He stops. Considers the right word. “It’s Daddy’s job. Not the contract’s.”
I hold onto his shirt. “Okay,” I say.
“Okay,” he says.
The police come and go. He talks to them. Comes back. Gets into bed beside me, puts his hand on my back, and the apartment is quiet again—the right kind of quiet, the kind with someone in it—and I sleep with my face against his shoulder.
At some point before I go fully under I hear him say, quiet: “I wasn’t scared out there.”
“I know,” I say.
“I was scared getting back to you,” he says. “That’s new.”
I don’t have a response. I squeeze his arm. He covers my hand with his.
I stay awake after. He doesn’t—or maybe he does, I can’t tell, his breathing too controlled for me to read clearly. Probably both of us lying in the dark with the apartment quiet around us and the new thing in the room.
He was scared getting back to me.
Not scared going out. Not scared of the man in the hall.
Scared of the distance between the threat and me—of whether I’d be okay in the sixty seconds it took him to handle it and get back to the bedroom door.
I’ve known men who were brave. My father’s colleagues, soldiers, people who ran toward things.
Brave is the absence of fear. This is something else.
This is a man who was afraid for me and went anyway, and came back.
I press my face against his shoulder.
That’s the difference. All my life I’ve been looking for it, and I didn’t know it was this: not a man who isn’t scared. A man who’s scared of losing me, and goes anyway.
In the morning he makes eggs. He doesn’t mention it. He doesn’t need to. The thing he said is in the apartment now, named the same way my word is named, and it’s enough.
He stays on his side of the apartment for a while after breakfast. Not distant—occupied. He checks his phone twice, sends two messages I don’t ask about, then closes it and picks up the report he was reading yesterday like nothing changed.
But it did. I know it did. He said it’s Daddy’s job, not the contract’s, and that sentence is still in the air between us.
I sit at my kitchen table with my laptop open and I look at the report document in front of me and I don’t read a single word of it for forty minutes.
At some point he walks past me to refill his coffee and he stops behind my chair. His hand settles on my shoulder—a brief, certain weight. Then it’s gone. He keeps moving.
I look at the door he disappeared through.
Daddy, I think. Not saying it. Just the word, sitting in my chest where it’s been sitting since the breakfast table, settling deeper every hour.
I think about the eleven-year-old version of me watching soldiers in a base parking lot and wondering what it would feel like to be someone they protected.
Not the general’s daughter, not an asset, not a person of strategic value.
Protected. The way you protect something you’d break a coffee cup over.
I drink my coffee and think about dangerous men who are dangerous for you. How different that is from dangerous men who are just dangerous. How long I’ve been looking for the difference.
He puts a plate in front of me. Sits down across the table.
“Eat,” he says.
“Yes, Daddy,” I say.
His jaw goes tight—that glass-cut jaw, dark with stubble. His eyes go soft. Both at once, on the same face, at the same moment. I didn’t know that was possible until him.
I eat my eggs. He eats his. The morning comes in through the window, ordinary and golden. The cracked coffee cup is still on the counter where neither of us has moved it. And I think: I live here now. In this dynamic, in this apartment, in the gravity of this man.
I don’t know when it happened.
I don’t think I’m going to leave.