He made a sound. Just a quick grunt, like she was pulling stitches out of a mostly healed wound.

“So, just stop doing that.” She laughed at herself, at how bossy she sounded. “I know it’s not easy, but you have to let it out. You’re a good man who is grieving because his wife died. And no one, no one, no one ever feels simple after someone they love dies. Everyone feels complicated as hell, all loose strings and sloppy endings and regrets. That’s life. That’s the world. The same world where you get to make furniture and tuck your son in at night and walk him to school. You can’t get one part without the other. It’s just not the way it works.”

This time, Sebastian didn’t squeeze his eyes closed. He looked her square in the face while two feverish, determined rivers carved their way down his face.

A tight, tense feeling rose up in Via’s throat, and her lips pursed at the same second a track of tears spilled out of her own eyes. They just stared at one another, dim gold in the lamplight, two people who’d been broken and were learning to live all patched up.

She knew that he might look at her and realize, terribly, that it never ended, the patching yourself up after you get so viscerally destroyed. But she also hoped that he’d look at her and realize that it was worth it. Every dirty, ugly, scraping step forward was worth it.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“WELL, ARE YOU going to tell me what’s wrong, or are you going to continue making everyone in this house ten minutes late for everything?”

Seb had to close his eyes and laugh at his mother-in-law’s question. Muriel Sullivan, the least nurturing woman on Earth. And yet? She was still asking. She could have been ignoring his long stares out the kitchen window, his deep, unfortunate sighs, his losing track of his car keys four times in a row.

Seb had been that way since last week. Since Via had come over when he’d been sick. He’d been feverish and dozy and emotional, and she’d drawn his pain out of him like a long, thin splinter that he wasn’t sure he’d even known was there. He’d felt like shit that night. Delirious and hot. He wasn’t even positive what time she’d left, he’d passed out on the couch so hard. He’d woken up the next morning with his fever broken and a Post-it note on the coffee table with instructions to call her if he needed help getting Matty to school.

He’d lain there on the couch, stinking of sickness and broken fever, the afghan kicked off onto the floor, his face pressed into his arm. He’d waited for the wave of shame and humiliation to drag him down to the bottom of the ocean. Because, oh God, all that truth he’d told the night before. Just bomb after bomb. He’d said things out loud that he hadn’t even let himself think in the privacy of his own mind. And of course, the person he’d chosen to tell it all to was someone he’d told himself he was going to STOP growing closer to.