One little girl announces, as I walk past, “I’m three!” and I tell her that’s awesome, and ask how old she thinks I am.

After brief consideration, she tells me I’m a teenager.

Last week she said I was one hundred, so I’m taking this as a win. Before I can respond, a four-year-old named Arham I’ve literally never seen not in a Spider-Man costume flings himself at me, hugging my knees.

No matter how foul my mood, Story Hour always helps.

“Sweetie,” Arham’s mother, Huma, says, reaching to peel him away before we topple.

“Who here likes dragons?” I ask, to near-unanimous cheering.

There are a lot of sweet families who’ve become regulars since I started here a year ago, but Huma and Arham are two of my favorites. He’s endlessly energetic and imaginative, and she rides that magical line of keeping firm rules without squashing his little weirdo spirit. Seeing them together always makes my heart ache a little bit.

Makes me miss my own mom.

Makes me miss the life I thought I’d have with Peter, and the rest of the Collinses.

I shake myself out of the cloud of melancholy and settle into my chair with the first of today’s picture books in my lap. “What about tacos?” I ask the kids. “Does anyone like those?”

Somehow, the kids manage even more enthusiasm for tacos than they did for dragons. When I ask if they already knew that dragons love tacos, their shrieks of delight are earsplitting. Arham jumps up, the heels of his sneakers flashing red as he shouts, “Dragons eat people!”

I tell him that some maybe do, but others just eat tacos, and that’s as good of a segue as I’m going to get into Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin, illustrated by Daniel Salmieri.

No part of my week goes as fast as Story Hour does. I get so sucked into it that I usually only remember I’m at work when I close the last book of the day.

Just as I predicted, the energy that greeted me has fizzled, the kids mostly settling into pleasant sleepiness in time to pack it in and head home, except for one of the Fontana triplets, who’s tired enough to devolve into a minor meltdown as her mom is trying to get her and her siblings out the door.

I wave goodbye to the last stragglers, then start tidying the nook, spraying the mats down, gathering trash, returning abandoned books to the front desk to be reshelved.

Ashleigh, the librarian responsible for our adult patrons and programming, slips out from the back office, her gigantic quilted purse slung over one shoulder and her raven topknot jutting slightly to the right.

Despite being a five-foot-tall hourglass of a woman with Disney Princess eyes, Ashleigh is the embodiment of the scary-librarian stereotype. Her voice has the force of a blunt object, and she once told me she “doesn’t mind confrontation” in a tone that made me wonder if maybe we were already in one. She’s the person that our septuagenarian branch manager, Harvey, deploys whenever a difficult patron needs a firm hand.

My first shift working alongside her, a middle-aged guy with a wad of dip in his cheek walked up, stared at her boobs, and said, “I’ve always had a thing for exotic girls.”

Without even looking up from her computer, Ashleigh replied, “That’s inappropriate, and if you speak to me like that again, we’ll have to ban you. Would it be helpful if I printed you some literature about sexual harassment?”

All that to say, I admire and fear her in equal measure.

“You good to lock up?” she asks now, while texting. Another thing about Ashleigh: she’s always late, and usually leaves a bit early. “I have to pick up Mulder from tae kwon do,” she says.

Yes, her son is named after David Duchovny’s character from The X-Files.

Yes, every time I remember this, I inch closer to death.

I’m now old enough to have kids without anyone being scandalized by it.

Hell, I’m old enough to have a daughter named Renesmee on one of those U-5 soccer teams where the kids take turns kicking the ball the wrong way, then sitting down midfield to take off their shoes.

Instead, I’m single and unattached in a place where I only know my coworkers and my ex-fiancé’s inner circle.

“Daphne?” Ashleigh says. “You good?”

“Yep,” I tell her. “You go ahead.”

She nods in lieu of a goodbye. I circle the library one last time, flicking off the fluorescents as I go.

On the drive home, I call my mom on speakerphone. With how busy she is with CrossFit, her book club, and the stained-glass class she’s started taking, we’ve started opting for more, quicker calls these days, rather than twice-a-month hours-long catch-ups.

I tell her about how things are shaping up with planning the library’s end-of-summer fundraiser (ninety-one days to go). She tells me she can now deadlift one hundred and sixty pounds. I tell her about the seventy-year-old patron who asked me to go salsa dancing, and she tells me about the twenty-eight-year-old trainer who keeps trying to find reasons to exchange phone numbers.

“We lead such similar lives,” I muse, parking on the curb.

“I wish. I don’t think Kelvin had salsa dancing in mind or I might’ve said yes,” she says.

“Well, I’m happy to pass along this guy’s number to you, but you should know my coworker Ashleigh calls him Handsy Stanley.”

“You know what, I’m good,” she says. “And I’m also sending you pepper spray.”

“I still have the can you got me in college,” I say. “Unless it expires.”

“Probably just gets better with age,” she says. “I’m almost to book club. What about you?”

I open my car door. “Just got home. Same time Monday?”

“Sounds good,” she says.

“Love you,” I tell her.

“Love you more,” she says quickly, then hangs up before I can argue, a bit she’s done as long as I can remember.

Miles lives on the third floor of a renovated brick warehouse at the edge of Waning Bay, in a neighborhood called Butcher Town. I assume it used to be the city’s meatpacking district, but I’ve never Googled it, so I don’t know, maybe it’s named after an old-timey serial killer.

By the time I climb the stairs and reach the front door, I’m clammy with sweat, and inside I drop my tote and wrestle out of my cardigan before toeing off my loafers. Then I check my phone calendar against the whiteboard. The only thing that’s changed since last night is, I agreed to host the Thrills and Kills book club on Thursday while Landon, the patron services assistant who usually runs it, recovers from his root canal.

I scribble the book club onto the board, then grab a glass and fill it with cold water. As I chug, I amble toward the living room. In the corner of my eye, a sudden movement surprises me so badly I yelp and slosh half my glass onto the rug.

But it’s just Miles. Lying face down on the couch. He groans without so much as lifting his face out of the squashy cushion. His furniture is all comfort, no sex appeal.

“You looked dead,” I tell him, moving closer.

He grumbles something.

“What?” I ask.

“I said I wish,” he mumbles.

I eye the bottle of coconut rum on the table and the empty mug beside it. “Rough day?”