That wasn’t going to be a worry tonight, though. Becca was already wearing her flannel pyjamas and had scrubbed her makeup off.
Still… “I’m around the corner if you need me. I can be here on my pager if need be.”
She shook her head. “I’m going to watch something and go to bed early.”
“Call me if you can’t sleep.”
“I’m not going to call.”
Owen ignored that. “Call me if you needanything.”
“I need some alone time.” She said it like a confession, and he realized he was crowding her. He’d want the exact same thing in her shoes—had, in fact, locked himself in his bedroom nineteen years earlier so he could stare at the ceiling.
“Got it. I’m going.”
As she disappeared into her room, and he turned on his heel to head to work, a complicated wave of concern and regret flooded his mind. What could they have done differently?
Had he failed her somehow? Had they romanticized what it had been like to be teen parents? Becca was loved, God damn it, but that didn’t mean having her so young hadn’t been brutally hard.
Maybe the pregnancy wouldn’t last. He had a flash of guilt for wishing for a miscarriage, to take the choice out of her hands. More than a flash. That dark thought carried him all the way to work, where he parked out back and let himself in the side entrance.
In an ideal world, he’d make it to his office without running into anyone, and be able to bury himself in work.
It was not an ideal world.
The sound of voices drifted toward him from the kitchen. There were two cooking and eating spaces in the building, a full-fledged kitchen on the ground floor that was mostly used for the weekly training night for the volunteer firefighters, and a break room upstairs with a kitchen and microwave. That was where his paramedics grabbed a bite in between calls. Nobody had time to clean up from a full meal, and God forbid anyone left something behind for Owen to find.
He didn’t strictly speaking have adon’t use the downstairs kitchenrule, but it was understood that the space was only for cooking larger meals for the whole group. Or so he thought.
Laughter broke out. “Catch it!”
Catch what?
“We can’t do this during the day. The EMT supervisor’s a real—”
Owen stepped into the doorway and cleared his throat as he took in the scene. Two firefighters, not volunteers, but guys attached to his station from the main firehouse in Wiarton, were standing on either side of the microwave. One was holding a bag of popcorn. Owen knew his face was thunderous, because yeah, he had a tendency to be a realsomethingwhen people were messing up his space. “I work evening shifts from time to time as well, you know.”
The kid holding a bag of freshly microwaved popcorn clearly did not know that, because he dropped it, sending greasy kernels skittering all over the floor.
“There’s a microwave upstairs,” Owen growled.
“Someone else was using it.”
“Patience is a virtue.”
The kid’s face blanched. “We’ll clean this up.”
Owen glanced at the floor. “Soap and water to get the oil off the floor.”
“Yes, sir.”
Nights like this made him second-guess his decision to take the supervisor job when they built this new station. For most of his career he’d been happy to be a paramedic. The shift work had been tricky to work custody around when Becca was little, but when he was off, he was off, and in the summers he’d been able to be home with her for almost half the week. But as college loomed closer and closer for Becca, the promise of more pay—and a more regular schedule—had won out.
Somewhere along the way, he’d lost his sense of humour about things like tossing popcorn.
Owen felt old.
And as he sank into his chair behind his desk, he longed for the days when his daughter’s biggest worry was whether she would get both Barbies she wanted from Santa.
