Vincent Hanna didn’t believe in quiet anymore. Not after the last twenty years. His life had been built on the noise—gunshots, sirens, the whirr of overhead choppers, the slam of interrogation doors. The sound of his own footsteps chasing after men already half-dead inside. The noise was constant. It was his blood pressure, his breath, his faith.

But after the divorce, silence became something else. Something colder. The absence of motion. The stillness of a man no longer chasing anything because everything he’d chased had slipped through his hands.

Then there was you.

He met you on a scene, of all places. A double homicide in Echo Park—gritty, fast, textbook ugly. And there you were, crouched by a body, surgical gloves on, face unreadable, calm as hell. You weren’t rattled, not by the smell, the blood, the eyes frozen wide open. You were methodical. Efficient. But not numb. There was something behind your eyes—something like empathy that hadn’t bled out of you yet.

He didn’t notice your smile until the fourth crime scene. It came and went quickly—like you’d forgotten for a second that you weren’t supposed to let it show. That’s when he started showing up even when it wasn’t his call. Just to watch you work. Just to hear your voice when you read the body like it was a confession written in bruises and broken bone.

You never tried to impress him. You never asked him about his past, or pried into the wreckage of it. You just listened when he talked. You didn’t flinch when he spoke about the dark things—the things that ended marriages, put holes in men’s souls, turned cops into shadows. You just sat with it, nodded sometimes, offered nothing except presence. He hadn't realized how much he’d needed that.

The first time he kissed you was after a case that lasted twenty hours straight. You were both exhausted, sitting on the back bumper of an ambulance, shoes soaked in alley water, and you said something dry about the coroner's van always being late. He laughed harder than he had in years. And then he kissed you. Not out of passion, not out of desperation. Just… peace. Finally.

Months passed. You let him in, slowly. He did the same. You saw him for who he was—not just the badge, the chase, the heat—but the man behind it. The one who still drank his coffee too hot and read the obituaries more often than he should. You memorized the way his voice dropped when he said your name. He memorized the way your hands moved when you were deep in thought, writing in your notes, dissecting the details no one else could see.

He started staying over. Then you did. Then it wasn’t staying anymore. It was just being.

He bought the ring quietly, without ceremony, without anyone’s advice. It wasn’t flashy—he knew you’d hate that. It was small, simple. Honest. Like the way he felt around you. No noise. No fire. Just something steady.

He waited until after work, one night. You were in your scrubs, hair tied back, tired and leaning against the kitchen counter, sipping wine and reading a report. And he just looked at you—really looked—and knew. There would never be another woman like you.

So he walked up, reached into his jacket pocket, and held out the box without a word. When you looked up, he smiled—crooked, tired, real.

“I want to come home to you," he said. “Every day. For the rest of my life. You up for that kind of thing?"