The sun was fully up by the time she stood at the door of my apartment, giving me her phone number in case I needed it for anything. She left, and right as I was about to fix her contact name, my phone rang. It was Detective Cabela. She was assigned to my case and wanted to know if I could come into the precinct later that day.

The next day, I knocked on Lou’s door around dinnertime. Jessie answered again. This time I immediately noticed a lot of things I hadn’t noticed the first time we’d met. She had a nose piercing and a ton of tattoos. After all my portraiture classes in college, I got used to noticing the way people’s faces are put together, and she had a fierce, proud bone structure. Not pretty, not ugly, kind of intense. If I were to draw her, I’d start with rounded lines for her cheeks and forehead and sharp corners for her chin and nose. When she realized it was me at the door, she crossed her arms over her chest and I got a glimpse at her very defined muscles. Her hair was up in that messy bun again and she wore overalls and a tank top.

She looked like Rosie the Riveter.

She looked totally badass.

I held up the six-pack and the chocolate and the flowers and the burritos that I’d bought to say thank you for helping me out.

She’d invited me in and I watched in awe as she cracked open a beer for each of us using only the set of keys she had carabinered to her overalls. I am definitely a bottle-opener sort of guy. She couldn’t have seemed cooler to me in that moment. I thought back to the night of the burglary. I burned with humiliation. I’d showed up in my underwear on her doorstep. Weakly clutching a baseball bat I hadn’t even had the guts to use. I had cried in her living room. She’d put me in her father’s clothes and called the police for me.

I bet she would have singlehandedly beat the shit out of an intruder in her home. I was so embarrassed that I barely made it through that beer. I thanked her profusely, left the gifts, and was on my way.

And then, after that, every time I saw her, I found some way to make a total fool out of myself. She helped oversee the installation of my new security system. What had seemed totally reasonable when I was on the phone with the salesman then seemed like complete overkill in front of Jessie. I couldn’t help but wonder what she thought of me. The guy who didn’t even swing a bat to defend his own home but was now spending thousands to install a Mission: Impossible security system.