Excerpt:

“Did she come from the city?”

“What city?” Steve asked.

“Any city. Nobody seems to know anything about her.” Will glanced at the vet’s office. It had been one of the original homes in Weaver’s Circle, dating back over a hundred and fifty years. She had to have come here for a reason. She had the whole world to choose from.

“I thought she was from New York.” Steve used a fork to strip the crispy skin off his chicken breast.

“Ask Chief Dan,” Rick said.

“Do you think he knows everybody in New York because he used to live there?”

“No, I thought he might recognize her accent.”

“She doesn’t have an accent.”

“Everybody has an accent, you just don’t hear yours because you’re used to it.”

“Two semesters of community college and you’re a linguist?”

This hits two of my pet peeves. One) if you’re from a place, you must know everybody from there. When I was living overseas I did know a woman from North East Ohio, but there were others and every time I would meet someone who knew one of them they would say, “Oh! You’re from Ohio! You must know X!” No, not necessarily. My two closest friends in the UAE were both from Illinois, opposite ends of the state. Another was from Missouri and a thrid originally from Texas, but she’d spent most of her professional life in Oklahoma. (I also knew people from Ireland, South Africa, New Zealand, Colorado, and Hawaii to name a few.) So no, I probably did not know people from my home state. And two) “I don’t have an accent. You have an accent.” Everybody has an accent, you just don’t hear yours because most if not all of the people around you have the same accent. I love accents. I had a friend from Yorkshire and one of the features of that accent is the lack of a native phoneme. I spent a lot of time trying to get her to say words that had that phoneme to hear her not say it. Yeah, I’m weird. I’m good with it.