The humor drains out of the moment. This is the job—the real one. Diana Hartwell has a persistent admirer who's escalated from fan mail to something darker, and Salt & Steel was brought in because her publisher doesn't take chances with their biggest name. Calder assigned me point on this because he said I needed "something lower stakes than Kabul to ease into civilian work."
Lower stakes. Right. Because babysitting a bunch of novelists at a beach house is exactly where a former SEAL operator pictures himself at thirty-two.
Six months. That's how long it's been since I retired my trident. Since the world got quiet and stayed that way, and the silence stopped feeling like relief and started feeling like erasure. On the teams, every hour had purpose. Every breath had context. Now I wake up at 0430 because my body doesn't know how to stop, and the rest of the day stretches out like a road with no destination.
Calder offered me the job at Salt & Steel because we served together on SEAL Team Seven. He got out two years before me, built the company from a one-man operation into something real. When he called—three weeks after I separated—he didn't pitch it as charity. He pitched it as we need people who get it.
Getting it is the problem. I get the tactics, the logistics, the threat assessment. What I don't get is how to fill the hours when nobody's shooting at me.
My phone buzzes. Channel 16—the team's group text, named after the emergency maritime frequency because someone thought they were clever.
Riggs: heard you're on babysitting duty. any of the writers hot?
Decker: leave him alone. he's protecting literature.
Riggs: I’m just saying. writers are creative. could be interesting.
I pocket the phone without responding. Riggs will entertain himself with or without my participation.
The veranda is visible from my position near the east tree line—close enough to monitor, far enough to stay unobtrusive. The writers cluster in small groups, glasses in hand, voices carrying on the breeze. I scan faces. The poet, nervous but warming up. The thriller writer, positioned with her back to the wall—instinct or research, hard to say. The memoirist, already on her second glass.
And Kassidy Monroe.
She stands slightly apart from the group, champagne flute held like a shield. Her sundress—yellow, the color of afternoon light—shifts in the wind, and she keeps tucking a curl behind her ear that won't stay put. There's a tension in her shoulders that doesn't match the setting. Everyone else is relaxing into the evening. She's bracing for something.
Diana Hartwell approaches her, and I watch the interaction with professional attention. Hartwell is my primary—her safety is the priority. But my gaze keeps drifting back to Kassidy. The way she laughs a beat too late, like she's translating the conversation through some internal filter before responding. The way her smile doesn't quite reach her eyes.
She's performing. Wearing confident writer at a retreat like a costume that doesn't fit.
I've seen that look before—on guys coming home from deployment, sitting at family barbecues, smiling at all the right moments while something inside them screams. It's the look of someone trying to be who they were before the thing that changed them.
Decker radios in from the west side. "All clear. Switching to north approach."
"Copy. I've got east and south."
The mixer winds down. Guests drift inside. Kassidy doesn't. She slips off the veranda and heads toward the beach, shoes in one hand, wine glass in the other. My job is the perimeter, which technically includes the beach, so following at a distance is professional obligation. Nothing more.
She settles on a rock near the dunes and pulls out her phone. For a minute, she just stares at the screen. Then she starts talking.
Not on the phone. To herself. Or to the air, or the ocean, or some invisible character only she can see.
"She's standing on the porch. It's raining. He's leaving, and she knows she should let him go, but her hand is on the door frame and she can't?—"
Her voice is different now. Not the polished, slightly defensive tone from earlier. This is raw. Unguarded. She's inside whatever story she's telling, and watching her there—salt wind in her hair, bare feet tucked under her, working through someone else's heartbreak—is like catching a musician alone in a practice room. Private and a little sacred.
She pauses, frowns. "No. That's too passive. She won't let him go. She steps into the rain and?—"
The professional move is to keep walking. Pass by, nod, continue the patrol. That's what training says. That's what the job demands.
"Does she go after him?"
The question leaves my mouth before the professional part of my brain files its objection.
She nearly falls off the rock, which makes me feel like an asshole. Her eyes are wide—dark brown, catching the last amber light—and for a second she looks genuinely startled. Then the defenses slam back into place.
"Were you eavesdropping?"
"I was walking the perimeter. You were narrating pretty loudly."
