Two

Two

HAVE I EXPLAINED what I do for a living?

I usually try to put that off as long as possible. Because once you know—once I actually name the profession—you’ll make a long list of assumptions about me … and all of them will be wrong.

But I guess there’s no more avoiding it.

My life doesn’t make much sense if you don’t know what my job is. So here goes: I am an Executive Protection Agent.

But nobody ever knows what that is.

Let’s just say I’m a bodyguard.

Lots of people get it wrong and call me a “security guard,” but to be clear: That’s not even remotely what I do.

I don’t sit in a golf cart in a supermarket parking lot.

What I do is elite. It takes years of training. It demands highly specialized skills. It’s tough to break into. And it’s a strange combination of glamorous (first-class travel, luxury hotels, off-the-charts wealthy people) and utterly mundane (spreadsheets, checklists, counting carpet squares in hotel hallways).

Mostly, we protect the very rich (and occasionally famous) from all the people who want to harm them. And we get paid really well to do it.

I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking I’m five-foot-five, and female, and nothing even close to brawny. You’re conjuring a stereotype of a bodyguard—maybe a club bouncer with skintight shirtsleeves squeezing his biceps—and you’re noting that I’m pretty much the opposite of that. You’re wondering how I could possibly be any good.

Let’s clear that up.

Steroid-inflated bruisers are one type of bodyguard: a bodyguard for people who want the whole world to know they have a bodyguard.

But the thing is, most people don’t.

Most clients who need executive protection don’t want anyone to know about it.

I’m not saying that the big guys don’t have value. They can have a deterrent effect. But they can also do the opposite.

It all depends on the type of threat, to be honest.

Most of the time, you’re safer if your protection goes unnoticed. And I am fantastic at going unnoticed. All women EP agents are, which is why we’re in high demand. No one ever suspects us.

Everyone always thinks we’re the nanny.

I do the kind of protection most people never even know is happening—even the client. And I’m the least lethal-looking person in the world. You’d think I was a kindergarten teacher before you’d ever suspect that I could kill you with a corkscrew.

I could kill you with a corkscrew, by the way.

Or a ballpoint pen. Or a dinner napkin.

But I’m not going to.

Because if things ever get to the point where I have to kill you, or anybody else, I haven’t done my job. My job is to anticipate harm before it ever materializes—and avoid it.

If I have to stab you in the eye with a dinner fork, I’ve already failed.

And I don’t fail.

Not in my professional life, at least.

All to say, my job is not about violence, it’s about avoiding violence. It’s much more about brains than brawn. It’s about preparation, observation, and constant vigilance.

It’s about predictions, and patterns, and reading the room before you’re even in it.

It’s not just something you do, it’s something you are—and my destiny was most likely set in fourth grade, when I was first recruited as a carpool monitor and got a Day-Glo sash and a badge. (I still have that badge on my nightstand.) Or maybe it was set in seventh grade when we moved into an apartment that was around the corner from a jujitsu studio, and I convinced my mom to let me take classes. Or maybe it was set by all those terrible boyfriends my mother could never stop bringing home.

Whatever it was, when I saw a recruiting booth near the campus jobs kiosk during my freshman year of college with a navy and white sign that read ESCAPE TO THE FBI, it was pretty much a done deal. Escape was my favorite thing. When I tested off the charts on conscientiousness, pattern recognition, observational skills, listening retention, and altruism, they recruited me right up.

That is, until Glenn Schultz came along and poached me away.

And the rest became history. He taught me everything he knew, I started traveling the world, this job became my entire life, and I never looked back.

The point is, I loved it.

You have to love it. You have to give it everything. You have to be willing to step in front of a bullet—and that’s no small choice, because some of these people are not exactly lovable—and getting shot hurts. It’s high stakes and high stress, and if you’re going to do it right, it has to be about something bigger than you.

That’s really why people who love this job love this job: It’s about who you choose—over and over every day—to be.

The luxury travel is pretty great, too.

Mostly, it’s a lot of work. A lot of paperwork, a lot of advance site visits, a lot of procedural notes. You have to write everything down. You’re constantly on guard. It’s not exactly relaxing.

But you get addicted.

This life makes regular life seem pretty dull.

Even the boredom in this job is exciting somehow.

You’re on the move. You’re never still. And you’re too busy to be lonely.

Which always suited me just fine.

That is, until Glenn grounded me in Houston—at the very moment when I needed an escape the most.

THAT SAME DAY Glenn took me off the Madrid gig, my car wouldn’t start—and so Robby wound up driving me home in his vintage Porsche in the pouring rain.

Which was fine. Better, actually. Because I still hadn’t invited him to Toledo.

Maybe it was the rain—coming down so hard that the wipers, even on the highest setting, could barely clear it—but it wasn’t until we made it to my house that I noticed Robby had been weirdly quiet on the drive home.

It was too wet for me to get out right then, so Robby turned off the car entirely and we just watched the water coat the windows like we were at a car wash.

That’s when I turned to him and said, “Let’s go on a trip.”

Robby frowned. “What?”

Now I was regretting the randomness of the choice. How, exactly, do you sell Toledo?

Before my mother died. Before I got grounded. Before I got taken off Madrid. “Before I bought nonrefundable tickets to Toledo.”

Robby looked me over. “Toledo?” If he’d been confused before, now he shifted to full-on befuddled. “People don’t go on vacation to Toledo.”

But Robby sighed. “There’s no way we’re going there.”

His voice had a strange intensity to it. And in the wake of those words, he leaned forward and ran his fingers over the grooves of the steering wheel in a way that got my attention.

Did I mention that I read body language the way other people read books? I can speak body language better than English. For real. I could list it on my résumé as my native tongue.

Growing up as my mother’s child had forced me to learn the opposite of language: all the things we say without words. I had turned it into a pretty great career, to be honest. But if you asked me if it was a blessing or a curse, I wouldn’t know what to say.

Things I read about Robby in that one second: He wasn’t happy. He dreaded what he was about to do. He was doing it anyway.

Yep. Got all that from his fingers on the steering wheel.

And the tightness in his posture. And the force of the next breath he took. And the tilt of his head. And the way his eyes seemed to be using his lashes like a shield.

Robby looked down. Then a half-breath, a quick clench of the jaw, a steeling of the shoulders. “Because,” he said, “I think we should break up.”

Impossible, but true: He shocked me.

I turned to look at the dashboard. It was textured to look like leather.

I really hadn’t seen that coming.

And I always saw everything coming.

Robby kept going. “We both know this isn’t working.”

Did we both know that? Does anybody ever know a relationship isn’t working? Is that something you can know? Or do all relationships require a certain amount of unreasonable optimism just to survive?

I said the only thing I could think of. “You’re breaking up with me? On the night after my mother’s funeral?”

He acted like I was catching him on a technicality. “Is my timing the most important thing here?”

Just because it was true didn’t make it right. “That’s not relevant,” I said.

I guess timing really does matter. I’d been sleeping on a hospital sofa for days, up five times a night while my mother retched into a plastic bucket. I’d watched her shrink to a skeleton in that flimsy hospital gown.

I’d watched the life that had given me life drain away before my eyes.

After that, I’d arranged the funeral. All the details. The music, the food. I’d played host all day to high school friends, coworkers, ex-boyfriends, AA friends, and drinking buddies. I’d ordered the flowers, and zipped the back zipper on my black dress all by myself, and even put together a slideshow.

Robby had it wrong.

Because, despite everything, I loved her.

I didn’t like her, but I loved her.

And he’d underestimated me, as well. Because it’s so much harder to love someone who’s difficult than to love someone who’s easy.

I was stronger than even I knew. Probably.

But I guess I was about to find out.

Because as the rain started to ease up, and as I pressed the pads of my fingers to the window glass, I heard myself say, in a soft, uncertain voice that even I barely recognized, “I don’t want to break up. I love you.”

GLENN HAD WARNED us about this a year ago—back when it all started.

As soon as he’d heard the gossip, he called us into the conference room, and shut the door, and lowered the mini blinds.

But this was the legendary Glenn Schultz. He wasn’t falling for that. “You tell me.”

Robby held his best poker face, so Glenn turned to me.

But mine was even better.

Instead, like a man who’d seen it all and then some, he just looked back and forth between the two of us and sighed. “It was the rescue assignment, wasn’t it?”

Robby and I met each other’s eyes. Had we fallen for each other in the wake of an assignment to rescue a custody kidnap in Iraq? Had we survived gunfire, a car chase, and a death-defying midnight border crossing only to fall into bed together at the end—if for no other reason than to celebrate the fact that we were, against all odds, still alive? And was the adrenaline of that assignment still powering our semisecret office romance all these months later?

Obviously.

But we admitted nothing.

Glenn had been in this business too long to need something as pedestrian as verbal confirmation. “I know better than to interfere,” he said. “So I’m just going to ask you one question. It’s the easiest thing in the world for agents to get together—and it’s the hardest thing for them to stay together. What are you going to do when it ends?”

I should have held eye contact. That’s Negotiations 101. Never look down.

But I looked down.

Glenn was pretty pissed, and that was not unreasonable. We were his investment, his kids, his favorites, and his retirement portfolio all rolled into one.

Glenn rubbed his eyes and when he looked up, he was breathing in that noisy way that had earned him the nickname “The Warthog.”

He stared us down. “I can’t stop you,” he said, “and I’m not going to try. But I’ll tell you this right now. There’ll be no ‘leaving the company’ when this crashes and burns. You’ll get no pity from me, and you won’t get a letter of recommendation, either. If you apply somewhere else, I’ll torpedo you with the worst reference in the history of time. You’re mine. I made you, I own you, and goddammit nobody in this room gets to quit. Not even me. Understood?”

THAT WAS A year ago.

It’s funny to think how much I’d pitied Glenn’s pessimism back then. His third wife had just left him—not uncommon in this job, since you’re gone more than you’re home. I remember mentally shaking my head at him as I walked away from the conversation. I remember thinking that Robby and I were going to prove him wrong.

Smash cut to a year later: Robby dumping me in the rain, like he was doing us both a favor.

Oh. Her. “Don’t tell me what I need.”

Robby had the nerve to look wounded. “Be civil about this.”

That stung like a slap. I met his eyes for the first time and tried not to sound surprised: “We didn’t, huh?”

Um, no. That wasn’t fair to say. It was incredibly crass. And wrong. And probably a lie, too—a way for Robby to absolve himself. Sure, he’d dumped me the day after my mother’s funeral, but what did that matter if “we never really liked each other all that much, anyway”?

But fine. Whatever.

Though I could think of a hotel room in Costa Rica that might claim otherwise.

In the humiliation of that moment—Had I really just told a man I loved him while he was breaking up with me?—it was as if Robby wasn’t just taking his love away … but all love.

That’s what it felt like.

What can I say? It’s hard to think straight in a crisis, and the conclusion I landed on was that my only way to keep going was to get back to work. I didn’t need hobbies. I didn’t need to learn crochet. I needed to get back to the office, and get a new assignment, and win that position running the branch in London. It was as clear as needing air. I needed to do something. Go somewhere. Flee. Now more than ever.

But before I could step out of the car into the rain and forget him entirely, there was one question I still had to ask.

I looked straight into Robby’s eyes. And then, in a tone like I was just calmly curious, I said, “You said things between us aren’t working. Why is that again?”

He nodded, like that was a fair enough question. “I’ve given some thought to that over the past few months—”

My head gave an involuntary shake. “Me?”

Robby nodded, like saying it out loud had confirmed it. “It’s you.” And then, in a tone like he might even be giving me helpful advice, he said, “You have three deal-breaker flaws.”

The words echoed in my head as I braced for them. Three deal-breaker flaws.

Okay. He also worked all the time. But fine.

Um. Holy shit. How do you argue with that?