Matty laughed. “There’s snow outside!”

“I saw. It’s been snowing all morning. I was worried about you guys driving in it.”

“It wasn’t that bad,” Seb said, kicking his shoes off and making eyes at Matty to do the same. “How was your Thanksgiving?”

“Excellent. And yours?”

Via rose up, and he bent down and gave her a perfect kiss. Fresh from the cold weather and warm with affection. After helping towel the snow off of Crabby’s feet, she led the Dorners into her kitchen, where she had some snacks laid out. It was a few minutes later that Matty leaned across the table and started playing with the gold thumb ring she wore.

“Via,” Matty asked, twirling the ring, “Dad says that you’re in love with each other.”

Her eyes snapped up to Seb’s. He froze for a second. He’d referred to love between them a few times. But the phrase in love fell between them like a sack of potatoes.

Seb broke the tension by shrugging his shoulders like, duh. Via couldn’t help but smile.

“Yup,” she told Matty, but her eyes were on Seb. She watched him absorb the impact of her words. I love you.

“Okay.”

He was quiet for a minute, still fiddling with her ring. “Matty, do you have more questions? Seems like you do?”

“Well...” He shrugged. “Are you in love with me, too?”

Her breath caught as her entire world zoomed in on the little person in front of her, a blush on his cheeks and that mercurial brown hair looking almost blond in the sunlight. She could feel his legs kicking under the table like he was super nervous. There was nothing else except for Matty in that moment. Even Seb was blurred away. “Matty, I love you very much. You’re very easy to love.”

His eyes slipped up to hers for a second and then drifted away. “Okay.” Then he turned to his dad, a small smile on his face and his little fist in the air. “Knuckles, Daddy.”

IT WAS A few weeks before he said it back to her. The three of them were watching a movie a few days before Christmas. Matty was stretched out across them, his cheek on Via’s leg. Almost asleep toward the end of the boring Christmas movie, Matty rolled over and reached up to touch the ends of Via’s hair.

“Love you,” he mumbled right before he buried his face in her stomach and fluttered off to sleep.

Seb had tears in his eyes when she turned to him, joy rising within her like a geyser. It was a feeling she’d become very familiar with in the weeks since Thanksgiving. Maybe she wasn’t the most thrilling twenty-eight-year-old in the world, but her preferred lifestyle fit with Seb and Matty’s almost flawlessly. Lots of home-cooking and chilly afternoons at the playground. She’d introduced them to the rustic joys of the Cobble Hill theater over the big movieplex down the street and the three of them had been back to see three movies together, Matty and Via hogging all the popcorn between them.