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That one word was enough for Dean to pull himself from the bed, setting his bare feet on the floorboards. Sloane’s fingers lingered on his hip until he stood, stretching his arms toward the ceiling with a low grunt. He dressed quickly, pulling on his thicker clothes in deference to how cold it was outside.

“Love you,” Sloane murmured as Dean left the room.

“Love you too,” Dean said, smiling gently as he stepped into the dark hall.

Everyone had long since gone to bed, and Dean was left with the company of the twinkling lights as he walked down the hall into the dining room. The smell of chocolate wafted out of the kitchen, and with his head cocked, Dean padded in there. Ana stood at the stove, using the light over it as she slowly stirred the pot.

She looked up, jerking when she spotted him. “Oh! Dean, hello.”

Dean winced apologetically. “Sorry, didn’t mean to scare you.”

She shook her head, chuckling. “Don’t you worry about it. I’m just not used to anyone being up at this time of night.”

“Normally, I am,” Dean said.

“Sloane told me you sometimes get restless in the middle of the night and have to roam around for a bit.”

“He told you that, huh?”

Ana smiled. “I told youexactlywhat he told me. Never gave details, and I didn’t ask.”

Dean huffed, more annoyed with himself. “I guess I should’ve known. Sloane isn’t exactly one to give away too much.”

“He’s always been like that,” she informed him, reaching out to turn the heat off. “Even as a boy, he kept things close to his chest. And he got worse after their father left.”

“Sloane doesn’t talk about him much...or at all.”

“No, I imagine he wouldn’t. The girls were still young when Thomas left. Sloane, though...ah, he was old enough. And he had always been...a bit of a daddy’s boy. But don’t ever tell him that.”

Dean chewed on that for a moment before asking softly, “Sloane looks like him...doesn’t he?”

“Thomas?” Ana asked, and Dean nodded. “Thomas was a big man, but I think he would have had to look up to Sloane evenbefore the boy was done growing. Thomas was better at smiling than Sloane and laughed easier. He was a man who enjoyed a good time...which is probably why he left.”

Dean gave her a puzzled look as she laughed. “You sound okay about a man who left you with three children and not a lot of money.”

Ana shrugged, drawing two mugs from the cabinet. “I hated him for a long time. I could live with him leaving me, relationships end sometimes, that’s the way of the world. But it took me a long time to forgive him for how much he broke our son’s heart. Sloane was never the same after Thomas left, yet he’s proven to be a better man than his father ever hoped to be. I don’t hate Thomas anymore. I barely think of him, and yet, without him, I wouldn’t have my children.”

“I guess I owe him a debt of gratitude,” Dean said, knowing he would sooner punch the man than thank him.

She handed him a steaming mug. “I don’t think either of us is going to be thanking him anytime soon. And it’s probably best if you never bring him up around Sloane. I thought he was going to have a stroke when he visited a few years ago and saw I still had a picture of Thomas in a family album.”

Dean chewed his bottom lip in thought. “Do you still have it?”

Ana winked. “You want to see?”

Sloane would probably wonder why Dean cared, just as he wondered why Dean thought being a couple in front of his family was strange. Dean couldn’t always articulate why he felt something, but he knew he was feeling it all the same. And he’d learned that sometimes, the best way to figure out the why was to follow through.

“I would, yeah,” Dean admitted.

She led him into the dining room, crouching before the short cabinet that housed the ceramic mini village. Opening a door, she rummaged in the back and drew out a small picture album.It was a thin volume, each page just large enough to hold one picture. She flipped it open, rifling through it and smiling at the pictures.

“Ah, here it is, the one picture I have of them. The only one I could bear to keep after he left,” Ana said, handing it to him.

Dean took it, holding it to the nearest light and squinting at the image. He immediately understood why Sloane had such a natural repulsion to wanting to see his father. Save for Sloane’s darker coloring, he was almost identical to the man he was staring at. Thomas didn’t have the tattoos, and his features hadn’t fallen into a natural scowl, but he could have been Sloane’s twin.

And in his arms. “Is that Sloane?”

Ana nodded. “He was only a few months old.”