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Krazy Glue for this thing.”
    â€œHey. Don’t insult the duct tape,” she replied, grinning as she gave him a playful smack on the arm. “It might not be perfect, but it gets the job done. Plus it’s made in silver for a reason. Silver is a classy color. Matches everything.”
    He grabbed her hand and pulled her into him for a quick hug. Damn, how had a gimp like him gotten lucky enough to end up with a girl like Jenna? Proof that the world works in mysterious ways. Some white-collar chump out there was sitting in his billion-dollar mansion, wondering why he was all alone, and it was really just because he was too busy making heaps of money to be at a theme park in the middle of the workweek when some deranged psycho decided to shoot up the place.
    Now if only Yancy could talk her into marrying him one of these days.
    She pulled back from him, but grabbed his hand and twined her fingers in his. “Come on. I’m starved.”
    Once they were inside the little Italian place and seated at a table in the far right corner of the hole-in-the-wall establishment, Jenna groaned her typical end-of-a-long-work-day sigh.
    â€œHow was your day?” she asked.
    He sat back, gnawed on a breadstick. “Eh, typical. A couple of kids playing with the phone who got a nasty surprise when police officers showed up at their door, another guy who burned his ass trying to light his farts on fire.”
    â€œThat’s typical?” Jenna laughed.
    â€œNobody ever said the life of an emergency dispatch operator was boring. Got another domestic call from that same house again,” Yancy said, his heart plummeting as he remembered it.
    It was the third time he’d talked CiCi Winthrop through one of her husband’s drunken rages in the past couple of months, but it didn’t seem to get any easier. He did what he was trained to do while on the phone with her: take her information, get her to a safe place in the home if she couldn’t leave, and try his best to distract her while she waited for help.
    Unfortunately, that meant that over the course of three phone calls, he’d learned that when she was five, she’d wanted to catch a snail for show and tell, but her mother said they only came out at night. She spent the next couple of years unable to sleep in the dark because she was afraid giant slugs came into her room at night. He’d found out she was allergic to strawberries and that the only time she’d been to the beach was when she was ten. He now knew that even before he’d taken any of her emergency calls, she’d been in the hospital twice because her husband had beat her up, and the second time, she’d been nine weeks pregnant and was discharged after losing her unborn baby. Unfortunately, both of those occurrences hadn’t involved 911 calls. Just visits to the ER following bizarre “accidents” that no one could do anything about since the victim had, at the time, stuck to her stories of falling down stairs and bumping into shelves in the dark.
    â€œOh, no,” Jenna said, frowning. “Not again. Did they arrest him this time?”
    Yancy shook his head, closed his eyes. “I don’t know. I hung up with her when the cops checked in at the scene, but I doubt it. The last two times there was no visible evidence of physical abuse, no children to check, thank God.” A lump grew in Yancy’s throat at this statement. CiCi wished there were. “No property harm at other calls, either. On the one hand, I’m glad he hasn’t hurt her again, but on the other, sometimes I wish he’d give her a good smack across the cheek so when they came, they’d have to see it and she wouldn’t try to tell them it was a false alarm.”
    Jenna tore a breadstick in half. “Has she ever tried for a restraining order?”
    Yancy raised his eyebrows. “This girl is the poster child for battered person’s syndrome,