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to enjoy it.
    “Look,” he said. “I get it. You go to their profile, and you decide if there could be something there, based on surface impressions.”
    “Based purely on shallowness, yes. Why don’t you mansplain it to me some more?” She was teasing him. Of course looks were the first thing a person noticed. She found herself looking at the back of Coin’s neck, where his tee shift lay along his shoulder. A cord of muscle ran out of his short sleeve. His hands were sure on the computer now, pointing and clicking.
    “Hey, have you been working out?” she asked.
    It was an honest question—it looked like he had—but he laughed her off. “Okay, I get it. I’m shallow. But you have to have chemistry, right?” Click, click, click . “There are a few cute girls on here, but I have to say, a lot of them are just kind of …” He paused, and clicked a few more. “Not.”
    Lexie inhaled sharply. Her own profile was on the screen in front of him. They hadn’t talked about it yet—she hadn’t shown it to him.
    He clicked past the picture of Lexie and to the next one, a pretty brunette with a short bob and red lipstick. “I guess this one’s not bad.”
    Lexie waited for him to laugh. Then she would punch him in the shoulder for being stupid, and they’d get on with their browsing.
    “Nah,” he said. “She’s a vegan. Good for her, but I need my bacon on Saturday mornings.” He clicked past three more.
    He didn’t say a word about flying past her own picture.
    While he was talking about the Nots.
    Lexie’s stomach hurt, twisting into an acidic knot. The back of her throat tightened. He wasn’t joking. He wasn’t playing a prank on her. He’d looked at Lexie’s picture, and he hadn’t recognized her. He’d thrown her right to the bottom of the pile with the other girls who weren’t pretty enough.
    911 rang.
    Lexie lunged for the button, grateful for the ringer’s blare. So grateful she didn’t have to speak to Coin. Because if she’d had to, her voice would have wobbled, she knew it.
    As it was, her clear, strong voice said, “911, what’s the address of the emergency? Okay, tell me exactly what happened.”
     
     

CHAPTER NINE
     
    Lexie had gone weird there, at the end. Right when 911 had rung. Usually if firefighters were in dispatch and they ended up being the ones assigned to the call, she’d shoo them on their way even before she dispatched them to it, smiling as the waved them out the door.
    But she’d gone all mechanical. Answering the call—a man choking on a meatball—and dispatching Coin’s engine without meeting his eyes. Sure, she was also giving the wife medical instructions at the same time she was banging out the engine and the rescue, but Lexie could usually do both those things while waving and taking a sip of coffee. Maybe she knew them or something. They were just around the corner from Lexie’s house, after all. Maybe they were favorite neighbors. That must have been it.
    By the time Engine One got on scene, Lexie had talked the wife through the Heimlich, and the meatball had been expelled. Even though he was fine, Rescue One still transported the patient to the hospital, because he asked to go. In a British accent, the old man had pointed to his throat and said, “It’s still in there. ‘Ospickle. I want to go to the ‘ospickle to make sure she did me right. Maybe she kil’t me.”
    The wife had folded her arms across her broad chest and said, “I saved your bloody life, man. I did you more right than I done in years. You should thank the men, you ingrate.”
    Coin’s favorite part of the job was the interaction with patients. This wasn’t true of all his coworkers. It used to be that men—and back then, it was all men—wanted to be firemen because they wanted to fight fires. The fire service had attracted a certain kind of man with a specified skill set.
    Times had changed. Instead of taking care of loved ones at home, people today relied on the fire