“Manipulative jerk.”

“Love you too.”

I kiss him quickly, shake my head, and go into Papa Bear mode. I raise my voice so it carries down the hall. “That better not have been something breaking. I’d hate to think what would happen if two little kids weren’t capable of having nice things.”

Two squeals come from down the hall, followed by hushed whispers.

“They’re not even subtle, are they?”

“Well, they are related to you,” Otter says. “I don’t know that you have a subtle bone in your body.” He pauses, considering. “Well, except for when I’m inside of—”

“Unless you plan to do something about it right now, you better not even finish that. Seriously, Otter. What the hell.”

He waggles his eyebrows at me.

He’s such an asshole. I’m the luckiest man in the world.

He follows me down the hallway to a door covered in My Little Pony stickers and diagrams of the skeletons of a blue whale and a flying lemur.

“Yep,” I mutter before I push open the door. “Those are our children, all right.”

The room has changed in the last few years. Oh sure, it’s still that same pale blue as it was before, with the clouds painted on it. But gone are the stenciled tigers and elephants that had once pranced in a field of green grass and pretty flowers. The sun is still painted in the corner, and the stars still glow on the ceiling at night when the lights are low.

Now the room might as well be split right down the middle. On the left, the bed is made immaculately, books shelved, toys put away in the blue chest that sits on the floor. The walls are covered in the same My Little Pony stickers that were on the door, and it’s the only thing that looks slightly out of place, but Noah Thompson loves them more than life itself, and he had begged for us to allow him to put them there, insisting that they would help him sleep because they scared away the monster that lived under his bed. And when your son is staring at you with wide, earnest eyes and talking to you about his precious My Little Pony stickers, it’s pretty much a given that you’ll give in without even the smallest of arguments. In fact, when he told me that, I went a little overboard and bought him a stuffed pillow of his favorite pony, Princess Celestia, because there was no way a damn monster would ever put its claws on my child.

“You know he’s pulling your chain, right?” Otter asked me as Noah squealed, hugging the pillow close to his chest.

“There are monsters,” I told Otter as if he was stupid.

“Oh boy,” Otter said.