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Because it landed on top of a thing I’d already buried, and buried things don’t stay down when you keep digging next to them.

Christmas. The board game. Bo, not even looking up, asking her to be his mom. And Olivia going white. Her mouth opening and nothing coming out. That flicker I’ve seen before, in a church hallway, the day she found out Bo was mine and not my little brother.

She didn’t answer him.

I covered it. Moved Bo along to the purple square and let the moment close, and I told myself I was reading it wrong, the way I’ve told myself a hundred small things since October.

But here’s the math I can’t stop doing, alone on a slow shift with a mop I’m pushing across a floor that’s already clean.

She loves Bo. I know she does. I’ve watched her love him. She learns him. She talks to him straight, not down, not around. She taught him to make ranch and put his drawing on her fridge and she carries a painted rock in her coat pocket like it’s made of something.

She loves my kid.

And when my kid asked her to be his mom, she couldn’t say yes. And her best friend, who’s known her for years, says she’s not a kid person, like it’s a fact everybody’s always known about Olivia.

Here’s what nobody tells you about being a package deal for ten years. You forget you’re a package. To me, Bo isn’t a term of the offer. You don’t ask a person whether they’d like to sign up for the sun. But she is signing up. Every day she’s with me she’s signing up for a ten-year-old, for the whole life of him, the meltdowns and the appointments and the day he’s grown and the thousand ordinary days in between. That’s the actual offer. Not me. Us.

And I handed it to her fast. I know I did. I built a rule out of ten years of being careful, a list of people allowed near Bo that’s four names long, and I broke it in a church hallway over a dropped piece of paper, and I’ve been breaking it a little more every week since, because she made it easy, because loving her is the easiest thing I’ve done in a decade.

I didn’t watch the way I always watch. I let her all the way in before I made sure she’d stay.

And I know exactly what it costs when somebody doesn’t stay. I’ve got a note in a drawer that says she couldn’t do it and he’d be better off without her.

Bo’s already handing Olivia his. He asked her to be his mom.

And she went white.

We catch a call mid-afternoon. A kitchen fire that’s mostly smoke by the time we roll up, nothing we haven’t done a thousand times. And I’m slow. Half a beat behind on everything, reaching for the wrong line, missing a call on the radio because I’m somewhere else. Nobody gets hurt. It’s a nothing call. But Cap sees it, because Cap sees everything, and a nothing call is exactly where a distracted man shows himself.

Back at the house he doesn’t chew me out. That’d be easier. He just says, “Baker. Sit the next one out. Go find your head and bring it back,” and walks off, which is worse than yelling, because he’s right, and everybody heard it.

I’m on the back step with a coffee I’m not drinking when Wade comes and sits down next to me, shoulder to shoulder.

He doesn’t say anything for a while. That’s Wade. He waits.

“I’m fine,” I tell him.

“You missed a radio call and went for a line that wasn’t charged,” he says. “You’re not fine. Is it Bo?”

Because that’s the first place any of them go, and God bless them for it. Bo’s been the whole shape of my life long enough that the crew treats him like theirs.

“Bo’s good.”

“The woman, then?”

I don’t answer, which is an answer.

And because it’s Wade, and because we’re on a back step and not looking at each other, which is the only way men like us ever say anything true, I tell him. Not all of it. Enough.

That I’m in deep with somebody, that she’s good, better than good, that she loves my kid and my kid loves her. And that at Christmas Bo asked her to be his mom and she froze, and I can’t get her face out of my head, and I think I did the thing I swore I’d never do. Moved too fast. Let Bo love somebody before I made sure she’d stay to love him back.

Wade listens to the whole thing. Then he’s quiet a second.

“Can I say the hard thing?”

“You’re going to anyway.”

“You’ve told yourself for ten years that the reason you don’t date is Bo. That you’re protecting him.” He turns his coffee in his hands. “And it’s true. But it’s also a real good place to hide, Baker. Nobody can leave you if you never let them get close enough to.”