“Am not!” Matty insisted, then screwed his face up into a little twist. “Which rock star?”

Via and Sadie laughed as Via straightened his backpack on his shoulders.

“Maybe Prince?” Via supplied.

“Definitely Prince,” Sadie agreed. She had a huge smile on her face. “Just look at those little hips.”

“My dad really likes Prince,” Matty said, absently reaching up and lacing his fingers with Via’s. “Sometimes on Sunday mornings we have raspberry pancakes and listen to ‘Raspberry Beret.’”

Sadie and Via both threw their heads back and laughed. Hard. The image of huge, barrel-chested Sebastian making fruit pancakes and dancing to Prince with his son was too much for Via. She got that strange door open/closed feeling again, and it had her catching her breath.

“So he’s pretty sick, huh?” Via asked, ignoring the tight feeling inside of her.

“Yup.” Matty dipped the toe of his sneaker into a shoe print that had been pressed into the wet concrete decades ago. “I got him sick. But he says it’s okay because it was an accident. And that dads understand that sometimes they get sick when their boys get sick.”

Sadie made a little gasping noise and pressed her hand to her heart. Via understood perfectly.

“He should be better in no time,” Sadie reassured Matty. “He only had to miss a few days.”

“That’s true,” Matty said thoughtfully. “But it’s not quite fair because when I got sick, I only had to miss school, but he had to miss fun stuff.”

“Like what?” Sadie asked.

“Well, he had to miss nachos day in the cafeteria today, which is his favorite. And also he had to cancel two dates.”

Via missed a step when her toe caught on a crack in the sidewalk, but Sadie didn’t even notice. The redhead’s eyes were narrowed in on Matty’s face, an insane light in her eyes. She was finally getting a little Fabulous Mr. Dorner gossip, and she apparently didn’t give a rat’s ass about the integrity of the source.

“Your dad goes on dates?” Sadie asked innocently, shamelessly.

“Sadie!” Via hissed. It was so inappropriate to ask Matty this that she felt heat all the way to the roots of her hair.

Matty didn’t seem to notice or understand the impropriety of the question. The six-year-old played with the toggle on his backpack strap and nodded fervently, almost viciously. “Yeah. Moms and dads can go on dates!” His face was knit with both certainty and confusion. Via got the distinct impression that he’d had this same argument with a classmate. “Well, I don’t really know about moms. But dads can. My dad goes on dates all the time.”

Sadie inhaled, swallowing wrong in her excitement and coughing out her next words. “Really? He tells you about it?”

Matty nodded, like the answer was so obvious he was surprised he even had to explain it. “He always tells me where he’s going and who he’s going to be with. He says it’s fair because I have to do that for him. But he goes on dates with ladies, and I go on playdates.”