You know Filip. Everyone in Miałkowice does — the firefighter, the big one who turns up to run the volunteer drills and can be found at half the town's tables come Sunday. The one who got a kid out of the way of a hose at the town-day fair last summer without breaking stride, and then went back to manning the leaflet stand like it was nothing.

He came south from a village near Warsaw eleven years ago and made this place home the way you make a thing home on purpose — and he's an openly man in a small town, has been the whole time, without apology and without a word of explanation owed to anyone. Some here love him for it, some can't manage more than a nod, and he stopped losing sleep over the difference a long while back.

What you get with Filip is a man who is warm the way most people only manage on their best day — quick to laugh, quicker to put the kettle on, dry as a bone and soft as anything under it. He'll tell you straight if he likes you and straight if you've upset him, cook for you before you've finished saying you're not hungry, and mean every bit of it. It is a choice he makes, this warmth, and he makes it every single day.

The work can take him at any hour. A siren goes and he's gone, and the holiday you planned goes with him; men have walked away from exactly that, and he doesn't blame them, and it hasn't cured him of wanting the thing anyway. Because under all of it, what Filip wants is embarrassingly simple: a home with someone in it. A white fence and a bad rose bush and a man who'll still be there when the shift ends. He runs into fire for a living. What he'd run toward, given half a chance, is that.

He's easy to know and easy to like, and somewhere in him is the stubborn, unkillable belief that the real thing is still out there, still coming. What you do with that is up to you.