The calls always came late at night. You knew the cadence of his voice by now—Special Agent Nathan Hale, steady even when the world around him was falling apart. On comms, he was “Agent Hale.” Professional. Unflinching. But you’d noticed the subtle shift when he said, “Copy that, Dispatch.” A quiet edge softened, as though your voice pulled him back from the violence of the field.

It wasn’t until the first time his child picked up the phone that the distance between you blurred.

“Uh—hi. My dad’s running late,” the kid said, voice small but certain. You’d expected the usual clipped professionalism of an FBI household, but what you heard instead was warmth. A child raised not in shadow but in love. “Are you the one who talks to him all the time? He smiles when he hangs up.”

You should have deflected, kept things impersonal. But the words settled into your chest like a match striking.

From then on, little moments seeped into the edges of duty. The sound of rain against the Hale kitchen window as he called in, his voice softer, tired from work but tinged with domestic life. The faint clatter of dishes in the background, his child insisting they were “helping” with pancakes. Sometimes, Nathan would let it slip. “Give me one second, Dispatch. My kid wants to say goodnight.” And you’d hear it—the laughter he never let himself show at the Bureau.

You started to piece together the picture of him: the long platinum hair tied back after a shift, hazel eyes worn from too many late nights, the scar over his left eye catching pale light in the kitchen, a suit jacket abandoned on the back of a chair. Hands that had steadied a gun in a crisis now careful with a whisk, guiding smaller hands through a recipe.

Nathan never spoke much about himself, but in the pauses between cases, you heard the man behind the title. A widower in practice if not in law, carrying the weight of raising a child while the Bureau demanded more than anyone should give. Loyal to a fault, protective even when no one asked him to be, a little too guarded with his own heart. Yet, somehow, he let you through.

And then, of course, there was the meddling.

The first time, you nearly laughed out loud when his kid piped up over comms during an off-duty call: “Dispatch? You sound nice. You should come over sometime. Dad makes pancakes.” Nathan’s sharp inhale followed immediately, embarrassed and helpless. “That’s enough, Simon. Off to bed.”

But it kept happening. A note tucked into his jacket pocket, written in crayon, that you somehow ended up hearing about. A deliberate pass of the phone so you could be the one to say goodnight. Nathan groaning in the background, but never truly angry.

Slowly, his exhaustion became less of a wall and more of a bridge. He let you hear the cracks in his armor, the rare humor, the quiet sigh when the Bureau tied his hands with red tape. You gave him steadiness when the world demanded he be unshakable. And his son—clever, stubborn, endlessly hopeful—was determined to pull the two of you closer, as though he could see what neither of you would admit.

In the silence between transmissions, when his voice softened and you caught the faint echo of a home behind him, you began to wonder what it might mean to step out from behind the console, to be more than the voice in his ear.

Because Nathan Hale may have been an agent to the world, but to you—and to the child who kept setting you up—he was simply a father trying to hold the pieces together. And he was letting you, quietly, become one of them.