The sound wasn’t weather. It was mechanical thunder—low, layered, the kind of vibration that climbs up your ribs and holds them in place. Eight crumpled dollars were sweating in Sienna Clark’s palm when the night shifted. A man lay gasping on the asphalt by a chrome motorcycle, the fluorescent lights above him buzzing like a nervous thought. The gas station attendant shouted something from the doorway about minding your business. An older driver in a trucker hat told her to walk away.

She didn’t.

She spent the last of what she had on aspirin and water and knelt on cold concrete. The stranger’s hand found hers. She told him to breathe. Sirens wound closer, blue and red glassing the pumps. A paramedic nodded at the tablets melting on his tongue and said, “Smart move. You probably just saved his life.”

He had a name—Hawk—and a younger rider, Cole, who spoke to Sienna like she’d just done something holy rather than ordinary. “Call this number tomorrow,” he said, pressing a card into her shaking hand. “He’ll want to thank you.”

Sienna walked home with $1.50 left and a question that wouldn’t sit still: What had she just stepped into?

Morning answered.

At 7 AM, the rumble rolled down her block like a marching band made of engines. She pulled the curtain back. A row of motorcycles—polished, disciplined—lined both curbs. Neighbors came out with mugs and bathrobes and a knot behind their ribs. Mrs. Johnson, who keeps a flag on her porch from Memorial Day to Thanksgiving, gripped her phone. Mr. Rodriguez looked as if he expected a patrol car to swing around the corner and change the script. Kids watched from windows with breath fogging the glass.

Sienna stepped outside with Maya’s small hand in hers and felt the tight circle of fear close around them—voices rising, fingers pointing, a crowd’s electricity turning on the person who’d been brave when nobody was looking. She held her ground because there was nowhere else to put her feet.

Cole stepped forward, hands open. He didn’t shout; he introduced himself to a street that didn’t want to hear his name. “We’re not here for trouble,” he said. “We’re here for her.”

A truck pulled up. Boxes came off like an answer to an unspoken prayer—groceries, furniture, bedding, toys. Then Hawk stepped down, moving cautiously but standing steady. He met the neighbors where they were, with a voice that didn’t flinch. “You saw the vests and the patches and made a call,” he said. “She didn’t. She saw a man dying and spent what she didn’t have to help him.”

Silence cut cleanly through the fear.

Hawk pressed an envelope into Sienna’s hand. Inside lay a check that shouldn’t have been real—twenty-five thousand dollars—and a letter offering a job: Community Outreach Coordinator at Lily’s Legacy, the nonprofit started after his little girl died because help didn’t come fast enough. Full benefits. Health insurance. A salary that meant the word “tomorrow” wouldn’t scare. The air changed. The ground changed. As neighbors watched, a life turned.

By noon, her apartment carried the weight of new furniture and relief. By sundown, every locked expression on the block had eased a notch. By the time the engines rolled away, leaving the street to birds and bus brakes and the regular American morning, a seed had been planted that would change far more than one family’s rent notice.

That was the beginning. It was not the end.

The next day, Sienna put on a clean blouse—one she’d saved for interviews that never called back—and went to Lily’s Legacy for paperwork she hadn’t dared to imagine. The office sat in a modest storefront near the county courthouse, a flag rippling from a bracket above the door, the crown-with-wings emblem in the window. Cole met her with coffee and a stack of forms, a tour, and a seat that had always been waiting for her even if she couldn’t see it until now.

A woman named Andrea from HR explained the insurance with a crisp compassion Sienna didn’t realize she’d been starving for. “Maya’s inhalers will be covered,” Andrea said, sliding a page across the desk. “No co-pays.” Sienna stared at the words as if looking through a periscope into a new life. She signed. She breathed.

Her first assignment came before lunch. “We try to begin at the corner,” Hawk said, tapping the map pinned to the wall with thumbtacks. “Start on your block. Find the need no one’s calling about because they’re too proud or too tired to dial.”

Mrs. Patterson, three doors down, answered in a robe, a good blouse peeking through as if she’d tried to decide who to be for the visit. She’d been halving her heart pills to stretch a month into six weeks. Pride sat in the room like a relative who doesn’t know when to leave. Sienna explained the program and saw in the older woman’s face the exact blend of relief and embarrassment she’d known all year. “We can cover a three-month supply, and we’ll do it again,” Sienna said. “That’s what this is for.” Hawk made a call. The first delivery came that afternoon.

Word traveled in the good way and the hard way, the way it always does. A cousin of Mr. Rodriguez called from Detroit to confirm that yes, Lily’s Legacy had paid for therapy that steadied his life. The young mother two courtyards over knocked on Sienna’s door with a pie nobody could afford and a story about her son’s surgery being covered by a fund she thought was a rumor. Online, a clip from the morning the bikes lined the block found more strangers than anyone expected. The comments started rough—labels hurled from far away are always easier to throw—and then shifted as families Lily’s Legacy had helped put their names to their gratitude. It’s harder to slander a door you’ve walked through yourself.

Not everyone changed their mind at the same pace. Two days into the new job, a note got taped to Sienna’s door: Pay rent or quit pretending you’re special. It was not the landlord’s first warning. He’d raised her voice in the management office last month and gotten told about policy and late fees. He’d smiled in a way that made her stomach go cold.

On Friday, a letter arrived with a stamp that always means trouble. Eviction proceedings. Court date. One more shove toward the cliff.

Sienna brought the paper to work. Hawk read it and set it down in careful increments like it was hot. “We’ll go with you,” he said. “You won’t stand there alone.”

Housing court feels like the DMV set to a sorrow soundtrack. Names called. Heads down. Stories told in three sentences that never come close to the truth. The landlord, a man whose ring wore a groove in his finger, told the judge about numbers and dates. Sienna told the judge about job offers and a check and an insurance card and a nonprofit whose director sat two seats away trying to look quiet and half succeeding.

The judge looked at the ledger, looked at the faces, looked at the ledger again. “You’ve paid the arrears?” she asked.

Hawk slid a receipt across the table, already stamped by the clerk two floors down. “Paid this morning,” he said, “with late fees.” The landlord blinked like a man who’d thrown a punch into a mirror.

“Case dismissed,” the judge said, and the gavel’s knock sounded like the first bar of a new song.

On the way down the courthouse steps, under an American flag that slapped at the October wind, a woman in scrubs approached Sienna. “I saw your video,” she said. “Thank you. People say a lot about folks with vests. They never see the ones in my waiting room with a hand on a friend’s shoulder.”

Sienna nodded, not trusting her voice. Justice isn’t fireworks most days. Sometimes it’s a stamp and a nod and a door that stays open for one more month. Sometimes that’s enough to change the next month, and the next.

Work filled her days quickly, a rhythm of calls and visits and lists with checkmarks so satisfying she almost laughed at them. She met Marcus, a veteran who’d been living in his car and going shower-to-shower at different gyms on a rotation only he understood. She met Rosa, a mother trying to choose between a winter coat and winter heat. She met a high school junior who translated for her grandparents at every appointment because nobody else could explain a pharmacy receipt to them without slowing the words down.

There were skeptics, because this is America and we are taught to be careful. A blogger with a camera and too much time filmed Sienna walking into the office and posted a headline designed to burn. A talk radio host used her name and the word “gang” three times in one sentence and then used the word “think.” The comments flooded and ebbed and flooded again. Cole handled the calls that mattered. Hawk put his phone on Do Not Disturb unless it was a client or a clinic or a donor he trusted. Sienna learned a fact that carried her through those storms: doing the work is louder than any rumor if you keep doing it.

What they built together kept drawing breath.

The lot on Elm and Third had been an empty rectangle of dirt with a broken chain-link perimeter for as long as anyone remembered. Kids cut across it to school, shoes staining with dust in the summer and mud in the spring. Lily’s Legacy bought it with a grant and a promise and a blueprint that Sienna held like a hymn: a food pantry, a training lab, two classrooms, three exam rooms, a play space, an office, and a sign. Clark House, not because Sienna asked for it, but because Hawk insisted that people who come through the door should see that the name belonged to someone who’d been where they were.

They broke ground on a Tuesday with a borrowed podium and a microphone that squeaked three times before finding the pitch. The mayor said something about partnerships. The councilwoman said something about zoning. The school principal said something about kids needing safe places at 3 PM, when the temptations of the world look most like an open gate. When it was Sienna’s turn, she didn’t bring notes. “A year ago,” she said into the wind that lifted the corners of the tarp behind her, “I had eight dollars and a choice. I chose a stranger. I didn’t know that choice would lead me here. I only knew that if I walked away from him, I wouldn’t know who I was anymore. That’s all this is—remembering who we are, and making places that help us keep being that.”

Hawk stood off to the side, sunglasses tipping down his nose to wipe his eyes. Cole, who never cried at anything, cleared his throat. You can build a building with steel and concrete. You build a place with the way people stand when someone else is speaking.

It wasn’t simple. Nothing worth keeping is.

One night, a week after framing went up, a pickup truck nosed onto the lot and killed its headlights. Two men climbed the fence and moved toward the scaffold with cans and intent. They’d been hired by someone who wanted the permits to lapse, the money to evaporate, the story to fold back into the comfortable shape of cynicism. They didn’t get far. Neighbor porch lights clicked on in a chain. A retired sergeant on Maple Street had noticed the truck idling and called the number on the flyer they’d all saved—Lily’s Legacy Security. A few bikes rolled up in a civil procession. No shouting. A quick call to the police. The men froze with the cans in their hands and the fence at their backs and the sense, sudden and correct, that the town had decided who it wanted to be.

The city arrested the men and later, after some phone records made their way where they needed to, charged the landlord from down the block with conspiracy to damage property. He’d been angry since the day at housing court. He wasn’t angry after arraignment. He took a plea. He sold his building to a nonprofit that doesn’t threaten mothers or cut corners on code. The tenants kept their homes and the boiler finally got the attention it had been begging for through a winter and a half.

The morning the drywall went up at Clark House, Sienna hung a snapshot of her grandmother above her new desk. The older woman’s face—lined, bright, unafraid—looked out at a room that didn’t exist when she’d said the words Sienna kept living by: Kindness costs nothing, baby, and sometimes it’s all we got to give. Under that photo, Sienna kept a glass jar half full of paper slips, each one a first name that had walked through their door in the last month. Every Friday, she’d lift the lid and read them quick as a prayer.

Marcus got his apartment and a job in a machine shop that smelled like work and oil and belonging. He came back with a key on a lanyard, grinning so hard Sienna thought his face would never return to neutral. Rosa’s daughter had her surgery funded. The high school junior spent afternoons tutoring at the center and got handed a scholarship packet one day that made her shout into the hallway and then cry behind the supply closet because joy can be loud and private at once.

On the day the sign went up, a boy from two streets over grabbed the rope and helped pull while everyone chanted without agreeing to—Clark House, Clark House. Somebody hung bunting in quiet red, white, and blue scallops under the awning. It wasn’t a holiday, but it felt like one, the kind where the grill smoke and the band mix with a sense that you belong to the place you’re standing.

There were setbacks, because life stays honest. The blogger filmed again and insinuated again and got more clicks than truth did. A donor backed out because his board wanted something safer to brag about at a gala. A rumor circulated that the center didn’t vet anyone and was just a magnet for people who didn’t try. Sienna read it at midnight and took the words into her chest and woke up with them still there. She told Hawk she didn’t know if she was strong enough to hold other people’s doubts and her own.

Hawk put a coffee in her hand and walked her to the window. “You know what the blog can’t do?” he asked. “Show up at 3:15 when the kids come, or at 8 AM when Mr. Williams gets his blood pressure checked, or at 9 when Mrs. Patterson sings to the receptionist because her prescription got refilled without a fight. The work is the only story that finishes itself. Let them write. We’ll build.”

The ribbon cutting wasn’t slick. The scissors stuck. The mic went out halfway through the mayor’s sentence. But when Sienna and Maya put their hands on the ribbon together and pulled, the sound it made was like fabric deciding to be two things at once: what it had been, and what it was making room for. The first people through the doors found flour, canned beans, a dentist volunteer on Thursdays, a job board, a whiteboard with tutoring times, and a corner where a retired nurse named Laney took blood pressures and listened to people talk about everything except that.

That afternoon, an email arrived from a producer who said the words “feature” and “documentary” and “audience” with the soothing professionalism of someone who has experience turning lives into narratives. Sienna said maybe later. She had hams to slice and a flyer to proof and a print cartridge to replace. Fame can wait. Breakfast can’t. There were boxes on the dock that said COMMUNITY CENTER in black marker because someone had mislabeled them at a warehouse that handles a hundred pallets a day. She smiled at the handwriting and sliced the tape.

By Christmas, the center had a tree in the lobby and a menorah on the front desk and a table where kids could glue popcorn chains and paper snowflakes. By New Year’s, the job training lab had a waiting list. By February, the pantry shelves needed a bigger truck. By spring, the sound of after-school laughter got so loud at 3:45 that people on the sidewalk slowed down without meaning to and wondered if they had time to volunteer.

Sienna learned to stand up in rooms that had never made space for her before—grant interviews, zoning updates, a breakfast with the city’s business leaders where she said the words “return on investment” and watched a tableful of suits lean in because compassion makes economic sense even if you don’t like the poetry.

If there was a moment when she realized her life had crossed a line into a place it wouldn’t retreat from, it was after a town hall where a handful of voices had tried to shout down the center’s budget request. A woman in a cardigan said, “We can’t help everyone,” the way people use a truism to tuck their fear into the right pocket. Sienna answered gently and specifically and won the vote by three. When she walked out under the flag that hung outside the brick municipal building, the gas station attendant stood beside the steps waiting.

He looked smaller without the doorway behind him. “I was wrong,” he said, hands shoved into his jacket like he was afraid of them. “I told you to leave that man alone. If you had, he’d be gone. If you had, maybe none of this—” he gestured toward the blocks around them, the school bus braking at the corner, the library sign flipping to OPEN— “maybe none of this happens.”

Sienna held his eyes without anger. “We all learn,” she said, the same way she’d said it at the station when she asked to hang a small plaque on the wall. The plaque had gone up, plain black lettering on brushed steel. HERE, A SMALL ACT OF KINDNESS CHANGED EVERYTHING. LILY’S LEGACY. People touched it when they pumped gas, the way you touch a sign near your house to prove you’re still here.

On a bright Saturday in June, they held the first block party Clark House had ever thrown. Flags ran up and down rails, little paper ones stuck in cupcakes, big cloth ones snapping from porch poles. The grill smoke folded into laughter. Maya rode her bike in a straight line that wasn’t straight at all and kept pedaling when her mother—a mother with a car that started every time now—let go. Mr. Williams told a joke he’d been saving since 1998 and pretended to be mad when everyone laughed too hard to hear the punchline. Laney danced with kids who had sticky hands and faces that didn’t know what sorrow looked like when it wasn’t wearing the mask of yesterday.

Hawk arrived late, leaning on Cole a little, his doctor still keeping him honest about rest. He brought a folder under his arm and never looked at it until the sun slanted enough to make the shade of the tent necessary. “We’ve been doing spreadsheets,” he said to Sienna with a mock grimace. “Never thought I’d say those words with pride.” He slid the folder across the table. Inside was paperwork scholars of bylaws would appreciate—documents for the purchase of the building where Sienna lived, the sale already complete. Not to Lily’s Legacy. To a community land trust co-owned by the center and the tenants, with a covenant that no unit could be priced beyond what a family like hers could carry. Her rent would drop, and in time, she’d be offered the chance to buy her apartment for a figure that made tears show up even when she told them not to. Stability written down is a form of poetry as serious as any you’ll find in a book.

“You can’t keep doing this for me,” she said softly.

“I’m not,” Hawk answered. “I’m doing it because you did this for all of us when you spent eight dollars like it wasn’t anything and it was everything. You opened the door. We just walked through and held it.”

Summer pulled fall after it like a kite string. School started. The after-school program hit max capacity. The pantry moved three hundred families a week through a line that didn’t feel like a line because there were chairs and conversation and job postings pushed across the table like opportunities instead of pity. The clinic added a second day for dental. A law student clinic popped in on Wednesdays to work through housing forms and medical debt and the kind of paperwork that can break your heart if you face it alone.

One afternoon, a film crew came with a camera woman who had soft shoes and quiet questions. “We want to tell your story,” she said, “but only if you want it told.” Sienna looked at the room behind her—people reading, people filling out applications, people laughing—and thought about what stories do when they’re released into the wild. “Tell this,” she said. “Tell them about the Thursday we didn’t have peanut butter and a man brought a case from his pantry and told me he used to be embarrassed to come here until he realized he was also part of the giving now. Tell them about the letter from a little girl who sent a dollar and said it was her lemonade money. Tell them about Mr. Williams, who still gets the punchline wrong.” The camera woman smiled. That film would later find millions. But even then, Sienna didn’t watch the view count. The line at 3 PM told her everything she needed to know.

On the anniversary of the night at the gas station, they held a gathering that wasn’t slick either, because slick has never fed anyone. The room swelled with families—people who had found an ear here, a form translated, a mortgage renegotiated, a pair of work boots, a reading tutor, a blood pressure check, a reason to keep going. Maya sat in the front row with a construction paper nametag and the ease of a kid who knows the security of a full pantry and a mother who doesn’t check the mail with her breath held.

Sienna spoke without a microphone because the room knew how to be quiet when it mattered. “A year ago, I spent eight dollars on a stranger and thought it was a loss I couldn’t afford,” she said. “I was wrong. It was an investment I didn’t know how to name yet. People told me I was bringing trouble into my life. Maybe I did. The good kind. The kind where trucks unload boxes and neighbors argue about who gets to carry the heaviest one. The kind where we get loud about kindness and quiet about rumors. The kind where a building goes up on an empty lot and refuses to come down because it belongs to the street now.”

Emily, whose mother’s cancer treatments had been covered when the family had no moves left, hugged her so tight afterward that the head of Sienna’s vest wrinkled. Mr. Williams saluted her with two fingers and then told his joke again and got the same laugh. The gas station attendant stood in the back and clapped like a man making amends publicly because private apologies don’t always keep their promises.

When the crowd thinned, when the last toddler stopped crying from overstimulation, Sienna and Hawk and Cole stood outside by the flagpole as the wind tugged at the lines. It was late. The center’s lights glowed like a neighborhood’s nightlight. “I want to show you something,” Hawk said. He pulled a small velvet box from his pocket. Inside was a key fob with the crown-and-wings logo stamped into the leather and a folded piece of paper tucked beneath. “You’re going to miss your old car one day, but you don’t have to miss it tomorrow.”

“What did you do?” she asked, half laughing, half giving up on not crying.

“Upgraded you,” Cole said, grin finally visible. “Nothing fancy. Something safe, something that starts, something that doesn’t make that noise on left turns that scares me even though I pretend it doesn’t.” Hawk shrugged. “Safety is dignity. Dignity is non-negotiable.”

Sienna took the fob, then the paper, heart ticking in her throat. The paper was a certificate. Not for a car. For a scholarship named after Lily. A fund seeded in her daughter’s memory, now carrying Sienna’s name beside it, earmarked for children in the district who needed medical care their parents couldn’t cover. “It’s not everything,” Hawk said, brushing a hand over his face. “But it’s something that keeps the circle going.”

She thought about the first circle, the one in the gas station lot with four people in it—her, a man on the pavement, a reluctant attendant, and a passerby who chose fear over mercy. Circles can widen. Streets can change. Even people can, if you give them a place to practice.

Autumn rolled into the holiday season, fluorescent leaves and early dark. Clark House hosted a Thanksgiving potluck where the rules were simple: bring what you can, take what you need, stay long enough to hear someone’s story. A local high school chorus sang a few carols a month later, their matching scarves bright, their parents crying behind phone screens. The center’s tree wore paper ornaments with names written in kid handwriting—Maya’s, Marcus’s, Mrs. Patterson’s, Mr. Williams’s, Hawk’s, Cole’s, Linda’s, Mrs. Johnson’s. Sienna hung one that said Grandma and pressed her fingers to the paper as if she could push the memory through.

On a cold morning in January, Sienna walked past the gas station where it started. The plaque caught the pale sun. The attendant—she’d learned his name by then, Jason—stepped out with a broom and a shy smile. “You know, I still think about that night,” he said. “About how I was sure that staying out of it was the smart choice, and I was so sure about the wrong thing.”

She tilted her head. “It’s a choice we’re taught,” she said. “Survive first, maybe help if there’s time later.”

Jason nodded. “I’d rather be the kind of person who helps first,” he said, and then he surprised them both. “I started volunteering Tuesdays.”

“At the center?”

“At the center,” he said, setting the broom aside. “I stock shelves. I know how to stock shelves.”

“Then you know exactly what to do,” she said, and they both smiled at the truth of it.

There were still days when bills were complicated, days when a bureaucratic snarl tied a knot they couldn’t untie without three phone calls and a favor. There were still nights when Sienna woke and counted what was in the checking account and what wasn’t. But most mornings now, the math included gratitude instead of dread. She still kept her notebook by the window. Three things, every night. The list had changed forms. One: The little boy who read his first full sentence in the tutoring corner and looked around like he’d just climbed a mountain. Two: The clinic caught Ms. Daniels’s blood sugar spike and sent her home with a plan. Three: Maya’s laugh—always three-quarters ahead of the punchline and twice as loud as necessary.

On the second Fourth of July after the gas station night, the center hosted a parade that was mostly kids on bikes with paper streamers in their spokes. They hung a big flag in the lobby that had belonged to Mr. Williams’s brother. There were speeches because this is America and we like speeches. Sienna kept hers brief. “We built a place,” she said, “and then it built us.” A grill sizzled. Fireworks popped low at dusk. Someone in the back started a chant, soft and then louder. It wasn’t “USA.” It wasn’t the center’s name. It was the simplest promise they’d learned how to keep: “We show up. We show up. We show up.”

Later that night, when the last sparkler burned out and kids were carried home sticky and asleep, Sienna sat on the center’s front steps with Hawk and Cole. The flag clicked against the pole. A single bike idled at the corner and then rolled away. “You know,” Hawk said, “I can’t pass that gas station without seeing you with that water bottle and those tablets.”

“You make me sound braver than I felt,” Sienna said.

“Bravest people I know are the ones who are scared and keep doing the right thing anyway,” he answered. “My daughter would’ve liked you.”

Sienna swallowed and looked up at the pinpricked sky. “I hope I’m making her proud.”

“You are,” Hawk said, like he was letting her know something he knew for sure. “And now you’ve given me a job I didn’t know I wanted. I get to tell her about this place every time I talk to her.”

They sat quietly until the timer on the walkway lights clicked off and the dark settled warm, full of crickets and a few late cars and the low murmur of a city that had decided to become a better version of itself a little bit at a time.

On the one-year-and-a-day mark, Sienna drove a new route on purpose. She passed the hospital where Hawk had woken to machines and a promise. She passed the courthouse where a gavel had knocked a bully’s plan off balance. She passed the block where she used to count porch lights with worry and now counted them with comfort. She parked in front of the center and just sat for a minute, fingers on the wheel, grocery list on the seat beside her with things on it she could now buy without subtracting something else.

Inside, there would be a rush at eleven, a lull at one, paperwork, a surprise or two—the good and the complicated—and maybe a family who walked in stiff and left looser. There would be a boy bragging about a B he’d earned like it was an Olympic medal. There would be Mr. Williams with a joke so old it became fresh when he told it. There would be Maya after school, running in with a question about a science project that needed baking soda and a volcano and adult supervision.

There would be Hawk and Cole and Linda and Mrs. Johnson, all the names in the jar, all the hands that made this happen, many of them impossible to trace back to one day and one decision. But Sienna knew the map because she’d walked it. It started with eight dollars and a man on the ground and the refusal to pretend that his life mattered less than the fear in someone else’s voice.

She turned off the engine, stepped out, and locked the car, the fob chirping in the summer air. She looked up, the Clark House sign steady against the brick. She pushed the door open and stepped into the hum—voices, a printer, a laugh, a baby squeal, the center’s heartbeat.

“Morning,” she said to the room she loved.

“Morning,” the room answered back.

And in a town with an ordinary name and a parade on the fourth Saturday of June, in a country where we argue and still somehow find a way to stand next to each other when it matters, a story kept going. It carried the weight of a life that had bent but not broken, a daughter with a bike, a man who made a promise at a hospital bed, a community that learned to recognize love in leather and denim and name tags and white coats and the hands of neighbors who’d once been afraid of each other.

Justice didn’t arrive all at once, trumpets blazing. It came the way morning does—quiet, certain, turning everything gold a little at a time. It took up residence on a corner lot in a building named for a woman who had once counted crackers for breakfast and now counted names in a jar. It set a table big enough to add one more chair. It hung a flag and meant it. It whispered the rule Sienna’s grandmother taught her and then raised the volume: kindness costs nothing; give it anyway.

And when the door swung open for the thousandth time and a stranger stepped in, Sienna looked up, saw a person, and said the two words that begin every good story in her town.

“Welcome in.”