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Cole flipped the third pancake, which he’d learned was the most important one of the morning. The first two were practice. The griddle hadn’t been hot enough, the batter hadn’t settled, and by the ruling of the pint-sized critic auditing him from across the counter, nobody with standards served a Callahan a pancake before the third.

“You’re going too fast,” Charlotte said, chin on both fists, watching him work with the focus of a scout who’d paid for her seat. “They get holes when you go fast.”

“They get holes because that’s how pancakes breathe.” It was crazy how much time he’d spent on the internet learning about the intricacies of cooking the perfect pancake just to appease his teammate’s daughter. “Plus, it’s how you know when they’re ready to flip. Otherwise you have to guess, and then they get bendy, and you don’t like that either.”

“That’s not a real thing.”

“It totally is. If you don’t believe me, have your dad look it up.” He slid the third one onto her plate, gold on gold, no brown at the edges, round as a puck. He’d started being in the kitchen early just to have them ready when she came down, and he wasn’t going to look too hard at why. He stepped back. “Rate it.”

She turned the plate a quarter, the way her dad turned a stick he was thinking about buying. “Eight.”

“Eight. That’s robbery.”

“The last one was a seven.”

“So I improved. That’s growth. Coaches love growth.”

Charlotte apparently decided the eight-out-of-ten pancake was suitable to eat, especially under a lake of syrup that would’ve gotten anyone else cut off. Cole let her. He was a lot of things in this house, most of them undefined, but he wasn’t the syrup police. That was a dad job, and he wasn’t the dad. He was more like the fun uncle, the one who hung out with her and let her get away with more than her parents ever would, and he wouldn’t have it any other way.

His phone lit up on the counter with the family chat, a few messages stacked up from back home. Britt had sent a photo of his nephew grinning around a missing tooth. Their mom had answered it twice. Logan was already hyping the fishing opener like it wasn’t half a year off. Cole thumbed Britt back a response about the tooth fairy’s going rate that he knew would make her laugh, pointed out to Logan that the fishing season didn’t start until the second week of May, not the first, and set the phone down.

Nobody had asked him anything. Nobody up there ever did. They loved him. They just never worried about him because he’d spent his whole childhood making sure they wouldn’t have to. With five kids and a busy repair shop, Cole had been easy to overlook, which was fine by him.

“Who’s that?” Charlotte asked around a mouthful.

“My family. Up north.”

“Are they coming to see you?”

“Nah. They’re busy being loud somewhere else.”

Charlotte weighed that and let it go. “But you live here. They should want to see where you live now.”

Cole loved that she was offended on his behalf. He turned back to the griddle. She’d handed him the one thing he’d spent months teaching himself not to want, and she had no idea she’d done it. He’d been making this kid’s breakfast for eleven months. Somewhere in there it had become the best hour of his day.

Ford came in from the hallway with a hairbrush in one hand and zero optimism about the next five minutes. “Charlotte. We talked about the hair.”

“I did it myself.”

“I can see that.”

“Mom says I’m in-ypendent.”

“Independent,” Ford corrected. “And you are. But you can’t go to school looking like you fought a raccoon and lost.”

He came around the island, and Cole caught the hitch when he changed direction, there and gone in half a second. Ford’s hand dropped to the counter’s edge, pretending like he was relaxing so no one would notice how much pain he was in. Cole had watched him do it for almost a year, and lately, the hitch came a beat sooner and cost him more to cover.

Ford turned Charlotte on her stool and started working the brush through the wreckage. He was terrible at it. He had big, careful hands, a goalie’s hands, quick enough to snatch a puck out of the air but useless against a six-year-old’s tangles. When he finally smoothed and gathered her hair, the ponytail was lumpy and lopsided, but Cole didn’t say anything.

Cole looked at the back of Ford’s neck, at the gray coming in at his hairline, at the width of his shoulders under a T-shirt gone soft with washing, a second longer than he had any reason to. He’d cataloged all of it by now without meaning to: the forearms, the stubbled line of his jaw, the heat that came off the man when he stood too close at the sink while Cole washed dishes. None of it was his to want.

“Ow,” Charlotte said.

“Sorry, bug.”

“You’re pulling.”