Homecoming for Beginners

Chapter 5

OLLIE KNEW intellectually that there was a housing crisis.

But Ollie did not know that by the time he got to the showings he’d booked, the apartments would already be leased.

“Now, I do have another unit in this building coming available next month,” his realtor told him placatingly. “Mrs. Hudson in 3B is moving to Boca Raton for her arthritis.”

Ollie considered the possibility of living without a kitchen for another four weeks. His intestines rebelled. Ollie liked vegetables. He liked having a digestive system that was not waiting for the dessert portion of an MRE. A month of restaurants and takeout and his mother’s dinners would set his gut biome back four months.

Besides, Theo needed nutritious meals.

“I’m looking to get into something a little sooner than that.”

Jenna said, “Hmm,” and consulted her tablet. “Well, there’s a one-bedroom guest cottage available starting next week. I can contact the owner and see if we can get you in for a showing this afternoon.”

Ollie had spent most of his adult life in barracks or in on-base housing. He didn’t need that much privacy. Theo could have the bedroom and Ollie could get a pull-out couch. Maybe it wasn’t ideal, but….

“Sure,” he said helplessly. “Let’s do it.”

The “one-bedroom guest cottage” turned out to be a converted one-and-a-half-car garage. It had a bathroom that would’ve fit in the back seat of Ollie’s Honda, a kitchenette slightly less cramped than a pop-up camper’s, a living area big enough for a couch and a TV, and a bedroom that would have to be Theo’s, because Ollie wouldn’t fit.

The front window also faced the driveway, so every time the occupants of the main house started their car, the headlights would shine right into Ollie’s sleeping area.

He sighed. “Do you think they’ll give me twenty-four hours to decide? ”

Maybe he should just suck it up and buy a house. A kid should have a yard to play in, right? But what if they hated it here? What if Theo’s cancer came back and they had to move somewhere that had a specialist? And Ollie might have savings, but he didn’t have a job yet—who was going to approve him for a mortgage?

No, buying a house was out of the question for now. Ollie shook hands with his realtor and promised he’d call tomorrow with a decision on the cottage.

He was on his way back to the motel—he had an hour before he had to pick up Theo—when his phone rang with an unknown number.

“Hello?”

“Good afternoon. Is this Ollie Kent?”

“Speaking.”

“Mr. Kent, this is Rosa calling from Secure Logistics. We’ve received your application for the guard position. Are you available to come in for an interview?”

He barely avoided sagging with relief. “I’d love to. What time were you thinking?”

“Well, are you available now?”

The interview went significantly better than the apartment hunt. It turned out to be mostly a formality; Ollie was trained in military operations and firearms use, so he was overqualified to babysit bank pickups. The company only operated during daylight hours, which meant he only had to find a couple hours’ worth of childcare for Theo, and the school had a latchkey kids program. Ollie just had to wait for his police clearance to come through and he could start job training tomorrow.

For the first time in months, some of the tension between his shoulder blades unknotted. Theo was in school. Ollie had a job. They had a line on a place to live. It wasn’t perfect , but it was all they needed for now. Maybe the owners would agree to a six-month lease and he could spend the meantime looking for something more appropriate.

His improved outlook lasted through picking up his kid (“Dad! We learned about tadpoles ! Did you know some frogs can lay ten thousand eggs a day?”), celebratory dinner at the town’s most upscale restaurant (an off-brand Applebee’s), a night’s sleep (blissfully without PTSD nightmares, possibly because the motel mattress was so awful Ollie couldn’t sleep deeply enough to dream), and dropping Theo back at school the next morning .

He went back to the motel and spent another half an hour looking through rental listings. If anything, the offerings depressed him more than they had two days ago.

But he couldn’t make himself pick up the phone to call Jenna until he’d done one last drive-by evaluation of the place.

The guest cottage was in a good neighborhood, close enough to the school that Ollie could even walk him in the morning, if he wanted to, and still get to work in plenty of time. It was situated on a boulevard lined with mature oaks. Ollie could just imagine what it would look like in summer when a broad, leafy canopy covered everything. A well-maintained sidewalk boasted chalk art from neighborhood kids—another great sign for Theo.

But as Ollie approached the block the guest cottage was on, his heart sank.

There was a firetruck parked on one side of the street, and dark smoke billowed into the sky.

Ollie pulled the Honda to the side of the road and parked a few houses down.

A crowd had gathered on the sidewalk, several retirees and one young mom with a toddler on her hip. Ollie put his hands in his pockets and leaned in to eavesdrop.

“—not rented yet, thank God —”

“What do you think happened?”

The sound of splintering wood split the morning. A cloud of dust and ash went up.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” said one of the firefighters, “is why you don’t do your own electrical work. Leave that stuff to the professionals.”

Ollie felt sick. If he’d been a little more desperate, he and Theo could’ve been in that house .

That settled it. He needed to raise his standards, even if it meant another few miserable weeks at the motel. The alternative was moving in with his parents, and Ollie could not do that.

Looked like the motel was home sweet home for now.

TY’S TWO classes shadowing Henry had not prepared him for the second graders.

This was likely because Henry only taught high school classes, and he knew that if he subjected Ty to seven-year-olds first thing he would flee for the hills.

Ty liked kids, he reminded himself.

Okay, well, Ty liked tigers too, but he wasn’t going to lock himself in a room with twenty of them for forty minutes.

He did have an educational assistant in each class, which helped immeasurably. This one’s name was Miss Tina, and she knew all the kids’ names and the fastest way to get them to listen.

“I also have their IEPs and medical needs memorized,” she assured him at two minutes to the bell. “Two peanut allergies in this group, one with epilepsy.”

“Wow. Kinda glad I’m a paramedic.” Though at the moment a little anaphylactic shock might be easier to handle than keeping the kids’ attention for the whole period.

Ty didn’t have a textbook for teaching first aid to kids. Hell, if one didn’t exist, maybe he should write one. But he certainly wasn’t going to have time for that in the next couple of weeks, because it immediately became apparent that he would need all his energy to keep up with the kids… and he only had to teach three periods a day.

Fortunately Ty did have a well-developed projecting voice, as well as a lot of firsthand experience keeping a cool head. “Good morning, second grade! My name is Mr. M”—like hell were the kids going to call him by his father’s name—“and I’ll be your health teacher for the next couple of weeks while your regular teacher is out.”

Tina had warned him about the likely influx of questions, and he fielded them for a few minutes because it would be unproductive not to.

And then they got down to the brass tacks of child-appropriate first aid, beginning with the obvious—a primer on when and how to call 911.

Which, naturally, began with a primer on when and why not to call 911.

“Okay, so, who in this room has been hurt before?”

Every hand went up.

“What are some of the ways you’ve gotten hurt? Um… Sarah?” He glanced at Tina for confirmation; she gave him a miniscule nod.

Sarah put her hand down. “I fell off my bike.”

“That must have hurt. Did you get injured?”

She nodded. “I scraped my knee. And my hands! ”

Ty called on a couple other kids to share their tales of woe. Connor’s dog had stepped on his foot. Monique pinched her finger twisting the chains on a swing set. Ty thought the days of that kind of injury were behind them; hadn’t everyone switched to rubber-coated chains by now?

“Let’s see a show of hands—who thinks Connor should have called 911?” No hands went up. “What about Monique?” Two hands. “Sarah?” Three hands.

God, he hoped they didn’t really think that, but he guessed it was his job to straighten them out. “Let’s try something else. When should you call 911 if someone is hurt?”

Connor’s hand went up. “If you break your leg!”

“Good,” Ty said. “That’s right, if you think you broke a bone, you should call 911. What else?”

“If there’s a car accident!”

“If you get bit by a rattlesnake!”

“If you get attacked by a grizzly bear!”

This predictably led to a whole lot more animal-themed disasters. Ty gave up trying to diversify their answers and tried another tactic. “Okay, that’s good—lots of good brainstorming there. Now let’s talk about why you shouldn’t call 911 if it’s not an emergency. Can anyone give me a reason?”

Bless Connor, who had his hand up again. Ty waited to see if any other volunteers appeared, but apparently Connor was the only one brave enough to hazard a guess. Or else he just liked talking. “Okay, Connor?”

“Um, one time, when my grandma was at my house, um, my dog peed on her shoes!”

Oh no. This kid was karmic payback. Ty had been that kid. He fought the urge to facepalm. “I think we’re getting a little off topic. Anyone else? Monique?”

She put her hand down. “’Cause you’ll get in trouble?”

Not what Ty was going for, but definitely a primary concern for a seven-year-old. “That’s true. If you call 911 and it’s not an emergency, you might get in trouble. Can anyone tell me why?”

No takers. Ty elaborated. “What would happen if I called 911 because I scraped my knee and they sent me an ambulance, but then Miss Tina got in a car accident? ”

That finally prompted them down the right track, and Ty spent the remaining ten minutes of class (how had so much time passed going over so little material?) giving an introduction on what to say to a 911 dispatcher when you did get through.

The kids were all still riveted to their seats when the bell went.

Miss Tina smiled at him as she herded them out the door toward their next class. “Not bad, new guy. I’m impressed.”

“I’m exhausted,” Ty said. “I have to do this two more times?”

“Don’t worry. I think your next class is fourth grade.”

“Teachers definitely do not get paid enough.”

The fourth graders got through the 911 talk in ten minutes. Normally that would’ve been great, but in this case it left him scrambling. Obviously he needed to rethink his lesson plan on the fly a little. Or, like, actually make one.

“Why don’t we try some role-play?” the class’s EA, Josh, suggested.

Ty shot him a horrified look, thinking What the fuck, they’re nine , and then Josh went on, “Mr. M will be the 911 operator, and… who can think of an emergency?”

Oh. That kind of role-play.

Every kid’s hand went up. Ty went through three demonstrations, and when the kids had gotten the hang of giving their names and locations and details of their made-up injuries (or the made-up injuries of their friends), Ty let them split up into pairs to keep practicing until the class ended.

“I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” he told Henry in the teachers’ lounge at lunch. “There’s a reason people go to college to learn how to be a teacher.”

“Tina and Josh said you did fine. Relax,” Henry soothed. “It’s just another day in paradise.”

Ty eyed the couch and wondered if it would be empty enough next period for him to have a nap. He had prep for the next two periods, meaning he could recover… or spend time figuring out how he was going to expand his material for the sixth-grade class he’d have after that.

Maybe he could wrangle both?

The sixth graders turned out to be his least favorite. They didn’t respect his authority, they didn’t raise their hands, they talked back, they whispered and giggled. One of them, a redheaded girl with smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose, threw a paper ball at his head. Ty caught it one-handed and redirected it into the recycling bin next to his desk.

“Did you even go to school to be a teacher?” one of the boys in the third row asked.

“No. A fact for which I’m currently very glad.” That earned him a few laughs. Maybe this class needed a different approach. “I went to school to be a paramedic.”

The kid’s eyes lit up. “Whoa! So you’ve treated people in car accidents and stuff?”

“And stuff,” Ty confirmed.

Another kid leaned forward. “Did you ever see anyone die?”

And suddenly they were so fucking young. Jesus. Ty had been that young once. “Yeah,” he said. He let the words come out as heavy as they wanted to. “Some of them were younger than you.”

Finally the class went silent. The EA looked like she didn’t know what to do.

Ty sat on the corner of his desk and resisted the urge to massage his temples. “Look. I can’t teach you how to be a paramedic in six weeks. There’s just too much to know, and the school board would probably try to put me in jail for traumatizing you. But I can teach you enough about first aid that if you get hurt, or your friends get hurt, or your family member gets hurt, and there’s no one else around to help you, you can give them the best possible chance of a full recovery. I can teach you how to help someone stay alive until the professionals get there. But only if you let me.”

The redhead and the third-row boy exchanged glances.

The girl nodded.

“Okay,” the boy said. “Where do we start?”

TUESDAY NIGHT after baseball practice, Ty did not get invited to beer and dinner.

“It’s date night,” Henry explained as they walked toward the parking lot. “We get our favorite takeout and watch trashy TV.”

He said it like he couldn’t wait for that kind of domestic night in. Ty’s heart panged in his chest. It sounded amazing.

When was the last time he had a night like that? Before Myra moved away, definitely. Even then, they’d both had busy schedules, both on shift work that didn’t always line up. Sometimes they only managed to have breakfast together as one of them was coming off shift and the other one was going on, but those moments felt all the more precious because of it.

But there was no point trying to date now, he thought as he waved goodbye to Henry and folded himself into the driver’s seat of his truck. Ty knew himself pretty well. He was an overcommitter. Case in point: He’d signed up to help coach baseball and ended up teaching elementary school. He could not date casually, which meant he couldn’t date. He would stay in town until he got as much of his father’s affairs settled as he could, and then he would go back to Chicago, where he belonged, where his team needed him. Where he could save lives.

But God, the idea of going home to an empty house—an empty house he hated —for the next few months made him feel like he was going to suffocate. He rolled down the truck window and closed his eyes to feel the breeze on his face.

He was just telling himself to get over it when a familiar Honda pulled into the parking lot next to him and Ollie Kent got out of it.

Ty took him in, head to toe, and somehow managed not to say Hey, rent-a-cop out loud. But that took all his restraint, which was probably why the next thing out of his mouth was “New job?”

Truth told, Ollie didn’t look a lot better than Ty felt. Ty didn’t know if that was because the mushroom gray of his uniform was sucking the color out of him or if he’d had a day like Ty had. Maybe worse.

Ollie didn’t bother trying to smile. “Gotta make a living, I guess. How was baseball practice?”

“You wanna replace me again?” Surely Ollie knew he’d filled Ty’s role on the team when Ty changed schools. “I don’t think this team’s bound for the championship. Although on the plus side, none of the batters hit themselves with the ball this time.”

Ollie actually laughed, and color returned to his face. “I think this is the first time I’m realizing how different it’s going to be not having my kid around all the time.”

“Lot of changes going around.” Ty drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as a sudden thought occurred to him. “Hey, do you and Theo have plans for dinner tonight?”

OLLIE NEVER expected to be invited back to the Morris mansion, but Ty pointed out that he owed Ollie a meal, at the very least, after Ollie had helped him make it to his father’s funeral without reeking of booze. Ollie had spent all day in a tin box that felt a little too much like other tin boxes he’d been in, and the idea of facing a meal in public made him want to crawl out of his skin. If he dissociated in Ty’s kitchen, at least Theo would have someone to talk to.

“What’s for dinner?” he asked in the parking lot.

Ty’s cheeks flushed a surprisingly dark pink. “Uh. I actually have no idea what I was going to make. Why don’t we ask Theo what he wants, and we can all go shopping?”

Ollie didn’t know how he ended up agreeing to that, but somehow it wasn’t that bad, trailing his kid and Ty through the local supermarket as they picked up ingredients for a baked pasta—“with homemade sauce,” Ty promised—and fresh fruit and ice cream for dessert.

Theo kept up a steady stream of informational chatter about his first full day of third grade, which included even more frog facts and a play-by-play of every joke his new friend Hassan had told. Ollie didn’t get all of them and wasn’t sure if that was because he wasn’t eight years old, because Theo had mangled the punch lines, or because Ollie was just in the wrong headspace to pay attention. Still, he didn’t get lost at the grocery store, nobody interrupted Theo to thank Ollie for his service, and the ride in the Honda to the Morris estate was comfortable.

And then Ty was letting them in the front door to his ridiculous house… which looked nothing like the last time Ollie had been there despite the fact that the only thing he could pick out as different was the lack of curtains. Now the front room was filled with afternoon sunlight.

“Wow,” Ollie said. “You undecorated.”

“Yeah, the Addams Family vibes are cool but not really the way I want to live my life.” Ty had taken a few doors off their hinges too, so now they could all go right through to the kitchen. He hefted the paper bag of groceries onto the island counter and then turned around to face Theo. “Okay, buddy, I’m going to get started cooking, but first, do you want to be my sous chef, or do you want to see the games room?”

Theo’s eyes went wide. “You have a games room ?”

“Do I have a games room.” Ty shook his head and popped the ice cream into the freezer. “Every creepy mansion has a games room. I’ll show you.”

Bemused, Ollie followed them on a brief tour down a hallway with actual painted portraits, where Ty pointed out a likeness of his great-aunt Clementine—“Dad said the song was written about her, but the old man was full of sh—uh, nonsense.” Then Ty led them to a broad enclosed sunroom at the back of the house.

“Not what I expected,” Ollie admitted.

“Yeah, you thought upscale billiards and snooker, right?”

“This is the coolest ,” Theo said.

Ollie had to admit it was pretty cool. The windows offered a panoramic view of the gardens, which were currently overgrown but in a kind of endearing way. There were beat-up sofas against one wall, interspersed with ancient arcade games like pinball and Pac-Man . A bookshelf crammed with books and board games stood in one corner next to a poker table that would seat eight. Instead of a pool table, there was Ping-Pong.

“Dad, Dad, can I play pinball?”

Ollie looked at Ty, who raised his eyebrows as if to say, What, you thought I’d ask your kid if he wanted to look but not play? Which was a fair point. “Sure. Just holler if you get lost on your way back from the bathroom, okay? I’m gonna help Ty in the kitchen.”

Translation: He was going to hide from arcade-game noises.

“Okay.”

Ollie followed Ty back down the hallway.

“Thanks again for inviting us,” Ollie said when they returned to the kitchen. “You really didn’t have to.”

“Look, I’m gonna admit up front my motives aren’t purely selfless.” He took down a cutting board, pulled a knife from a block, and started to chop onions. “I definitely owed you one. But also….” He set down the knife and gestured around him. “I hate rattling around in this place by myself.”

“I get it.” It had taken Ollie a while to adjust to living in Allison’s apartment in DC and not on base. Sometimes it got so quiet it seemed like the rest of the world had stopped existing, and it freaked him out. He had to open the window so he could hear traffic in the distance. “Uh, can I help with anything?”

Ty hummed noncommittally. “You drink wine?”

Ollie preferred beer, but he wouldn’t say no. “Sure.”

He uncorked a bottle of red and took out a heavy saucepan, which he doused liberally in olive oil and slid onto the stove. “It’s not my beverage of choice, but I need some for the sauce anyway, so….” He took down two glasses and poured ge nerously.

Then he looked up, and Ollie met suddenly serious blue eyes as Ty handed his glass over. “Uh, feel free to tell me if I’m overstepping here, but… you look like you could use a drink. And I’ll add the asterisk ‘but alcohol is a shitty coping mechanism’ because I’m a medical professional and I’m an atheist, so I’m not worried about God smiting me for being a hypocrite.”

Snorting, Ollie took the glass. He didn’t know much about wine, but this one smelled good. “You’re not wrong on either count. I’ll stick to the one glass anyway, since I’m driving.” And in charge of a kid.

Ty nodded and went back to his chopping—tomatoes this time, then garlic, which he smashed with the flat of the knife. “You can talk about it if you want,” he offered, like that was a totally normal thing to say to someone.

But that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was when Ollie said back, “I spent the day crammed into an armored truck, so worried I was going to have a flashback that I tensed every muscle in my body.”

He hadn’t even tasted the wine yet. The VA should move their shrink headquarters into Ty’s kitchen.

For a second he worried he’d fucked it up, that Ty was going to get all sympathetic and ask too many follow-up questions until he ended up chasing Ollie out of the house. But Ty just said, “That sucks. I wonder if the old man kept the Jacuzzi heated,” and then turned around and scraped the onions into the saucepan.

Ollie blinked.

Ty didn’t turn away from the stove.

Ollie sipped the wine. He was right, it was good, but it certainly wasn’t strong enough to explain why he opened his mouth again after he swallowed it. “They’re making me carry a gun, which I get is the point of being an armored guard, but I kind of hate it. I’ve shot enough people. Money seems like a stupid reason to do it again.”

As acknowledgment, he got a “hmm,” and then Ty pulled out another frying pan and decanted a pound and a half of Italian sausage meat from its butcher paper. “So you don’t keep a gun at home?”

Ollie felt like he’d slipped into the Twilight Zone. “I have PTSD and an eight-year-old, so no.”

“Okay, good. Guns are a deal-breaker for me.”

A deal-breaker for what? Was this some kind of very strange first date? Ollie would’ve known if he were being asked on a date, right ?

Right?

“I’ve seen too many gunshot patients,” Ty elaborated. The garlic went in with the onions. Suddenly Ollie was starving, bizarre conversation notwithstanding. “Especially young ones. I mean, one would’ve been too many, you know? It’s good that you’re smart about it. And open.”

I’m really not. You’re just kind of a human barbiturate. Finally Ollie said, “Is something on your mind, Ty?” because he was going to get a headache if he didn’t figure out which direction this conversation was going.

Yet another cooking vessel emerged from the cupboard, this one a deep pot. Ty filled it from one of those fancy pot-filler taps that Ollie had always secretly wanted in his kitchen one day, even though he didn’t cook. “I’m getting there, okay?”

Ollie took another sip of wine and figured he might as well relax on the barstool. “Okay.”

“Since we’re sharing and everything….” Ty dumped the sausage into the hot pan and Ollie’s stomach growled over the sizzle of cooking meat. “I told you I’m stuck here, right? Do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars. Until I can sell this house, which won’t be for a while. Because my oh-so-well-prepared father didn’t put it on a transfer-on-death deed, I’m stuck living in it. I have to wait and make sure there are no creditors, which includes, like, the government. I hope the old man kept up the property taxes.”

Ollie didn’t even want to think about the property taxes on a house like this. “Me too.”

“I have an appointment with my lawyer and my dad’s accountant on Saturday.” He stabbed at the sausage to break it into smaller pieces. “There’s enough money in the accounts I can touch to hire the best professionals to do most of the work, but it’s going to suck anyway.” Ty threw back half his glass of wine.

None of that made the eventual destination of this conversation any clearer, but Ollie decided to go with the flow. Ty was providing food and wine. Ollie could listen to him ramble. “You didn’t have a good relationship with your dad.”

With a soft huff, Ty scraped the tomatoes into the onion pan. “What gave it away?”

“Can I ask why?”

He froze, shoulders tensed; then he turned around and sat across from Ollie at the island. “It’s an ugly story. ”

“I’ve heard a few of those.” I told you my kid’s mom died.

Ty spun his wineglass in his hands and peered into its depths. “My mom found out she had breast cancer when she was pregnant with me.”

Oh. “Fuck,” Ollie said. Cancer had almost taken his kid—it still could. He couldn’t imagine having to choose to save his partner or his child.

Ty quirked a sad smile. “Swear jar.” He shrugged. “Dad wanted her to terminate so she could do cancer treatment, said they could try again after she recovered. Mom wasn’t having it. She wanted to carry to term, so she did. Had me and went right into chemo followed by a double mastectomy, radical hysterectomy, reconstructive surgery….”

“So she beat it?” Ollie asked.

“She and Dad thought so. But then when I was eight, doctors found something suspicious on one of her lymph nodes. She fought it for years, but eventually it spread too far. She died when I was sixteen.” A thump as one of Ty’s feet slipped off the stool and smacked the side of the island. “Dad didn’t make it a secret that he thought it was my fault. If Mom had aborted me like he wanted, the cancer wouldn’t have gotten as strong of a foothold.”

The way he said that, it sounded like Ty believed it too. “There’s no way to know that.”

“My dad thought he knew everything.” He got up again and dumped the pasta into the now-boiling pot, stirred the sauce to break down the tomatoes, and poked again at the sausage. “He blamed me, I acted out like any kid whose mom had died, and he sent me off to boarding school rather than deal with me. The end.”

“No wonder you hate this place.”

Ty sighed as he rattled through the spice jars, picking certain ones up seemingly at random and sniffing them, then shrugging and replacing them or adding them to the pot. “Not all of it. I like the kitchen—my mom and I used to cook together. And the games room. She started working on it when the cancer came back so she’d have a cheerful place to rest and look at the garden, even if she didn’t have the energy to weed it herself. We spent a lot of time there. But when the house is empty, it just makes me think of all the nights I was here alone with my dad when my mom was in the hospital for treatment.”

Finally Ollie saw what he was getting at. Should he wait to make sure he was right? It seemed like Ty was having a hard time asking for what he wanted. Ollie didn’t want to make the wrong assumption and come across as entitled, or like he was trying to take advantage.

Ty didn’t return to the island. His shoulders were pulled in as he stirred the pasta sauce, which now smelled better than any Italian restaurant Ollie had ever been to.

When fifteen seconds had gone by, Ollie tapped his fingers against the counter. “This morning I drove by a place I was thinking about renting, and it was literally on fire.”

“Jesus.” Ty barked out a laugh and finally turned around. His cheeks were pink from the heat of the stove, and the faraway expression was gone, replaced by something rueful and amused. “Thanks for the opening. You want to move in?”

A sane person would say no. But a sane person wouldn’t have wandered into Ty’s house that first morning and made him breakfast, and a sane person would not get to partake in whatever glory was going to come out of this kitchen in another forty minutes or so. Ty was already cleared to be around children, and he’d trained as a paramedic. So if Theo had an allergic reaction or Ollie put his fist through a wall, they were in good hands.

Ollie cleared his throat. “Let me just talk to my kid.”