“No, it’s time to start getting ready for bed.”

Matty looked for a second like he was going to argue but he glanced over at Via, all tucked in on the couch, and he obviously scented an opportunity. “Can Miss DeRosa put me to bed tonight? Since you’re sick, Daddy?” The second half of his statement proved just how much of a smooth talker this kid was.

“I’m sure Miss DeRosa has places to be,” Sebastian said.

“Of course I can,” Via said at the same time. She turned to Sebastian. “Really. I’d love to. You rest.”

She didn’t mind a bedtime story with a sweet, sleepy kid, but she was also very appreciative of a moment to gather her wits. That thing that had folded inside her stomach wasn’t unfolding. If anything it was stubbornly pulling denser and denser. Watching him talk about Cora had been a moment filled with motion and transition. It was almost as if he knew she had put him in a certain box and he’d stubbornly picked himself up and plunked right down into another.

The lamp lighting his face from one side. The stubborn tears that he’d wiped at first and then just let glint in the green-and-blue light from the television. Christ. The look in his eye as he’d just said whatever had come to mind next.

It had been honest. More honest than she was used to from almost anyone. She thought that probably Fin was the only other person who would have told so much truth.

“Miss DeRosa, are you cold?” Matty asked as she ran the bath for him, readying his shampoo and a washcloth.

“No, why?”

“Your hands are shaking,” the little boy observed.

And so they were. Actually, all of her was shaking as that thing inside her just kept folding down tighter and tighter. Soon it would be microscopic, and dense as the entire world smashed into the head of a pin. Tiny as it was, there was no room for this inside her. There was no room for this in her life.

“I’m all right.” It was a bald-faced lie. “Sometimes that just happens.”

She held out a hand to Matty, and naked and shameless, he climbed into the tub. “I can be by myself in here as long as you check me.”

She nodded, handing him his soap, and went into his bedroom to turn down the covers on his bed and choose a few books to read together. She took a deep breath. She needed to hold it together for another hour, and then she could go home. She could go home and call Fin and figure out what the hell had lodged itself somewhere between her lungs. Every time she breathed, her heart rubbed against this dense, sharp little intruder.

Via picked some pajamas from the drawer and headed back to the bathroom. She couldn’t help but smile at Matty’s beard of bubbles and the matchbox car he was racing down the highway of his own shin bone. She slicked electric blue toothpaste onto his red Cars toothbrush and grabbed his Kermit towel off the hook.