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“Morning,” she says, as if we do this every day. She doesn’t step aside. “Prue has a delivery for you, and I’ve been told to block the exit if you try to leave without it.”

“Prue told you that?”

“She implied it.” She sips her coffee. “I’m improvising.”

Last night, she watched me fix the fence from her window. I knew the second she started, because her scent drifted down through the open window, and then she ducked behind the curtain so fast I heard the chair scrape. I should probably tell her that. I’m not going to.

“Excuse me,” I say, and she finally steps back to let me through.

Prue is at the front desk with a basket in front of her.

“Molly’s family came by after you left yesterday,” Prue says. “Her mother wanted to thank you in person. I told her you’re not big on fuss.” She slides an envelope across the desk. “Molly made you a card.”

My name is written in the center in purple crayon, and beside it is a sketch of a green giant holding a child wearing yellow boots.

“Accurate,” Wren says, looking at the drawing over my elbow.

I’m glad that kid is okay. So glad I could sit down on the floor. It’s the thank-you I can’t do. Thank-yous mean people up close, looking at my face, and the last time someone looked at my face up close after I helped them, it didn’t go well.

“Put it on the community board,” I say. “Everyone who helped can see it. You called it in, and the medics did the rest.”

“She’d like you to have it,” Prue says.

“The board, Prue. Please.”

She sighs and pins it up, then nudges the basket toward me. Under a dish towel, there’s a box from Conjure and Crumb with a dozen muffins, and my spare fleece is folded beside it, washed, dry, and smelling of lavender instead of creek water.

“These will be stale by tomorrow,” Prue says, “and I’m not eating twelve of them for your pride.”

I take the basket. Wren reaches past my elbow, lifts the towel, and helps herself to a muffin without asking.

“Just doing your job, huh?” She points the muffin at me. “Pupils, pulse, breathing, the whole checklist. That’s not from the ranger handbook.”

“I had training.”

“You went above and beyond, Ranger. The family wants to say thanks. You’re allowed to let them.”

Then she bites the muffin, closes her eyes, and makes a tiny, happy sound in the back of her throat.

It goes straight through me. My whole body turns toward her like a compass needle.

Mine.

The word comes from a place older than thought, low in my chest, and it’s so clear that for a second I can’t hear anything else.

I didn’t plan for her. I wrote that memo before she was hired, never read her file. I didn’t want to know her name, where she trained, or what she’d be good at. My system has worked for years: I walk the preserve, keep it safe, and keep what needs keeping off every map.

A partner would change all of that. So I decided she’d be some temp who’d panic, or film everything, or get in the way.

She did none of it. She got the group of gawking tourists back from a creek, had my first-aid pack open before I asked, and handed me the fleece and the blanket in the right order. One day, and she already moves like someone I’d want at my back.

The man I was at twenty-two would have called it a crush and gone home to think about it. I’m forty-two now, an orc, and this body came with instincts nobody warned me about. I’ve spent years teaching myself how to keep these urges on a leash.

Right now, my instincts are watching a purple-haired stranger eat a muffin and declaring, that one.

Which is a problem, because she’s here to survey the north loop, and she’s smart.

“For the record,” Wren says, licking a crumb off her thumb, “accepting a muffin isn’t the same as accepting a parade.”