“Hi!” he said in something like surprise. “Wow. You’re, like, glowing. Did you get engaged or something?”

Her mind stuttered. Engaged? Yeah. No. “No. I just had a really, really good day at work.”

He raised his eyebrows and nodded, offering her a piece of gum that she accepted. “That makes one of us. I had a decidedly bad day at work.” He held up one bandaged arm.

“Oh my God!” Via leaned forward, as if she might be able to see through the bandage. “What happened?”

“Lost a fight with a band saw.”

“I...thought you were an architect?” She racked her memory for all the things she knew about Sebastian Dorner: Thor look-alike, widower, architect, father. She could admit to herself that it wasn’t a very comprehensive list.

“I was. But I quit after, ah, when Matty was in your class, actually. I’m a furniture maker now.” He lifted his ass off the library chair and pulled his phone out of his back pocket. He quickly exited out of some messages and then handed his phone over to Via.

Her mouth dropped open when she took in his webpage. “Sebastian, you made all this?”

She was floored, utterly floored. There were coffee tables and side tables and dinner tables. Chairs and bookcases and bed sets. All the wood he used was buttery and glowing, rich in tone and cut into interesting shapes. Every piece had some natural feature, like a knot or a live edge. He’d also integrated some sort of copper or steel into each piece in some way. It was utterly stunning.

When she looked up, he was grinning, with just a bit of color staining his cheeks. “Yup, I made all that.”

“You’re an artist.” She stared at his profile as she handed his phone back over. She thought of his rumpled suits from two years ago. For some reason, she’d never thought that he would have a creative side.

He lifted his hips to put his phone away, and the movement pressed his shoulder firmly into Via’s. “I try.”

“Do you have a studio?”

“Yeah. It’s in our backyard, actually. It was part of the reason we moved. I was sick of schlepping over to Red Hook to work in a rented space twice a day.”

“Why would you go twice a day?”

“Well, I’m a lunch monitor, so I always come back here at lunchtime.”

A light clicked on. “Oh, I see, so you take a break in the middle of your day to come do lunch monitor duty.”

He nodded. “And I run the second-grade soccer program on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.”

By her calculations, that meant that Sebastian was with his kid in the mornings, lunchtime and immediately after school. “Matty’s lucky to have his dad around so much.”

He blinked, those light eyes squinting as if he were trying to translate what she’d just said into a different language.

“All right, brilliant people! Palms up for positivity!” The staff meeting started, and thirty minutes later, Via found herself shoulder-to-shoulder with Sebastian, swinging their arms to and fro while Principal Grim led them all in a tight little cha-cha. She couldn’t help but grin up at him, and he grinned right back.