“Seb, you might not want to hear this, but you’re an incredible father. Devoted, hardworking, loving, firm. It’s your business whether or not you congratulate yourself, but you have to admit, empirically, you’re a good father.”

He nodded, but she wasn’t convinced he really believed her. Or if he was even able to hear her words through the haze of his fever. He rested sideways on the arm of the couch. He slowly lifted his feet up, and when they caught on the big cushion, Via reached down and hefted them right up onto the couch beside her. “Sometimes I think that makes it worse. That I learned how to do it only after she was gone. I wish she could have seen the kind of father I am now. It would have made her proud of me. I loved it when she was proud of me. And it didn’t happen very often in those last few years.”

His eyes pinched closed and he pressed his fingers into his eye sockets, obviously fighting a headache.

“Where’s your medicine?”

“Kitchen cabinet next to the sink.”

Via rose and brought the dishes into the kitchen. She selected some Motrin and one of his antibiotics, just in case it was time. She quickly chucked the dishes into the dishwasher so that he wouldn’t wake up to a dirty kitchen. While she performed the task, she thought of the very first version of Sebastian that she had met. Disheveled, lost, terse, destroyed. He’d loved Matty, that had always been palpable, but he hadn’t known right from left.

She’d thought at the time that it was just the shock of the loss he was enduring. But she realized now that perhaps he’d been just that clueless as well, when it came to taking care of his kid. She’d been witness to all manner of parenting styles. Often there was a primary parent and a secondary parent. That worked for some families. It wasn’t necessarily something that he needed to be feeling epic shame over.

She filled a fresh glass of ice water, rooted around in the freezer for an ice pack and grabbed the medicine. “Is it time for your antibiotic as well?”

He cracked an eye and nodded, gratefully accepting the pills and the ice water. He hissed when she slid the ice pack between the couch pillow and the back of his neck, but he didn’t move it.

“Via,” he started, and she knew he was about to apologize for everything he’d just said. She didn’t want him to.

“When my parents died,” she cut him off, knowing exactly what she was risking—that drafty space opening up inside her, but for Seb, for this moment, she would risk it, “I was lost, Seb. Gone. I’ve never found that part of me again. She’s gone. I came out the other side a different kid. It changes you. The event changes you, of course. I’ll never forget that day. But the grief changes you, too. The long, awful, up-mountain trek of grief, it changes who you are. I don’t know that you should feel shame for being a different person after you endured the loss of Matty’s mom.”