He just stared at her.

She plunged on. “Well, I included the number for a pickup/drop-off laundry service. I thought it would be a relief for a little while not to have to worry about it. They bring it back folded and everything. For bathing, these are some signs that your kid is ready to bathe by himself.” She handed him a pamphlet. “Although I don’t think Matty is quite there yet, so you should still be doing a lot of it for him.”

He sat there, numb and dumb, while she went through each point. There really was a remarkable lack of judgment in her tone.

He steepled his hands over his nose and mouth and leaned his elbows forward on his knees, so awkwardly tall next to the small table. “I can’t even imagine what you must think of me right now.”

She sighed and leaned back. “Mr. Dorner, you want to know what I think? I think that life is hard. And even harder when you’ve just lost someone. I also think that sometimes it helps for somebody to tell you what to do next. And this—” she tapped the checklist “—is what you need to do next.”

“MATTY!” SEBASTIAN CALLED down the hallway. “Carrots or zucchini?”

“What?” His four-year-old mini-me appeared in the doorway of the kitchen.

“Do you want carrots or zucchini in your lunch today?” It had been two months since his meeting with Miss DeRosa—he’d checked with Matty on her name—and Sebastian was really hoping that the rusty, cranking feeling in his chest was a sign that the gears were starting to turn. He slapped a dishtowel over his shoulder, swigged lukewarm coffee, and ignored the rib-deep exhaustion that had weighted him to the bed for an extra fifteen minutes that morning.

“I think you have to cook zucchini, Daddy.”

“Nah,” Sebastian said as he eyeballed the vegetable sticks he’d shoved into a Ziploc. “It’s like cucumber.” He snapped a quick bite of one of the extra zucchini sticks he’d just sliced and immediately spat it into the sink. “Yup. You’re right. Carrots it is.”

He slid the final item into the green cloth lunchbox and turned to his son. Sebastian’s brow furrowed.

“You’re in shorts.”

“So?” Matty puckered his blunt little face in a look that Sebastian recognized very well at this point.

“So, it’s February in New York.” He put the exact same expression on his own face.

“Fine. Pants.” Matty turned but quickly jumped back around. “But no mittens. Nonnegotiable!”

From his little four-year-old mouth the word came out much closer to “nah-nuh-goshe-bo.” Nonnegotiables were something that Sebastian and Matty had been talking a lot about over the last two months. It was a running list they kept. Things that they couldn’t argue over, no matter what.

Sebastian admitted that maybe they weren’t using the word completely right, but still, he liked the list.

• Daddy home for dinner, bath and bedtime. Nonnegotiable.
• Matty eats one green thing every day. Nonnegotiable.
• We don’t talk about getting a dog again until Matty’s birthday. Nonnegotiable.