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Nothing about this is nothing.

I start to type something back, something that’s absolutely going to give me away, when the tones drop.

The whole station shifts gear at once. The siren blares. The overheads kick on. Dispatch comes flat and fast over the speaker, an address, a call type, the day rearranging itself in half a second the way it always does.

I’ve got a hand on my gear before I’ve finished typing.

But I take the one second. Some things are worth one second.

Luke

I’m in.

Then I put the phone in my locker and go to work.

I get home a little after seven-thirty Monday morning, running on ninety minutes of sleep and a gas station coffee, and I don’t make it two steps inside before I’m ambushed.

“Dad! Dad! You’re home! Okay, so…” Bo is at the kitchen table in his school clothes with a bowl of cereal he’s clearly not eating. “Olivia came to lunch.”

“Yeah?” I set my bag down. “How was it?”

He takes one bite of cereal to prove he’s technically still eating breakfast. “And she got the enchiladas and she cut them up before she ate them, in a grid, and I told her that was a good system and she said thank you. Then she and Grandma talked about a book for a really long time and it was boring but I listened anyway. Because Olivia was there.”

Dottie, at the counter packing his lunch, doesn’t look up. “He held it together through forty minutes of adult conversation for that girl. That’s a record.”

Bo nods, solemn. “It’s a record.”

“Teeth. Bus in ten,” Dottie says, and Bo goes, still narrating something about enchiladas to no one in particular.

I drop into the chair he left, and Dottie slides a coffee in front of me without being asked.

“It was a lovely afternoon,” she says, answering a question I didn’t ask. “In case you were wondering. She’s easy to be around. Bo adores her. I like her.”

“I heard you invited her to bingo.”

“I did.”

I look at her. “I’ve never once seen you invite an outsider to bingo.”

Dottie wipes down a counter that doesn’t need it. “She’s not an outsider.”

“You met her two weeks ago.”

“Mm.” She keeps wiping. “Olivia’s going to be around a while, Luke. I’ve got a feeling she’ll be a regular.” She says it light, like the weather. “Might as well fold her in now.”

I open my mouth to ask what she means by that, or maybe to argue with it, or maybe just to hear her say it again.

But Dottie’s already moved on, hunting for Bo’s other shoe, humming something under her breath, done with the subject before I decided whether I was.

I sit there with my coffee and my ninety minutes of sleep and think about how fast this all happened. Two weeks. A wrong number, a coffee, a Sunday, a dinner, and now my grandmother is folding a woman into our Thursdays and my son is keeping records for her, and I’m too tired to pretend I’m not glad about every bit of it.

A regular.

Dottie doesn’t say things like that by accident.

By Monday afternoon I’ve slept a few hours, which is more than I usually get after a shift like that one, and I wake up restless the way I always do. There’s a specific kind of tired that sitting down only makes worse. So when I look out the back window and see old Mr. Delgado two houses down wrestling a fence panel the wind took out overnight, I’m already reaching for my boots.

“You didn’t sleep much,” Dottie says, not really objecting, because she’s known me long enough to know it isn’t a real conversation.