“You become warmer with age.”
“I become less tolerant.”
Callum, already slouched in the battered waiting chair with a coffee in hand, snorts.
“Can confirm. I’ve been listening to him complain for ten minutes.”
I toss my jacket over the arm of the sofa. “About what?”
Finley goes back to wiping down his station.
“Apparently,” Callum says, “modern romance.”
Without looking up, Finley says, “I matched with a woman on Hinge last night.”
“That was your first mistake,” I say.
“She opened with ‘u ok hun?’”
I huff out a laugh. “Romance isn’t dead then.”
“It died years ago,” Finley mutters, peeling off one glove. “I’m forty-two, single, and letting women with ring lights ask if I’m emotionally available.”
“Are you?” Callum asks.
“No,” Finley says. “But, according to her, that’s frowned upon.”
Callum snorts into his coffee.
I drop into the sofa chair. “You really know how to sell yourself.”
Finley finally glances at me. “At this point I’d settle for someone willing to split a takeaway and ignore me in companionable silence.”
“That is grim.”
“That,” Finley says, “is realistic.”
Callum looks between us and, for once, chooses not to make it worse.
A rare and unsettling display of maturity.
Finley strips off his gloves and nods at me.
“What are we doing?”
I pull the folded printout from my pocket and hand it over.
He opens it.
Studies it.
“Coordinates,” he says.
“Yeah.”
“And a paw print.”
“Yeah.”
