Colin was staring at the wall again. Blaine watched him with the mixture of frustration and worry that was becoming quite familiar to him as a parent. He walked to the kitchen, where Kurt was making dinner, and absently stirred the pasta.

“Isn’t Early Intervention at least worth a try?” Blaine asked, picking up the thread of many prior conversations.

Kurt clenched his jaw. He looked out over the half-wall into the living room and watched Colin reach out his hand, slowly petting the wall on the other side of the room. “He’s fine, Blaine. It’s supposed to be fifty words by age two, and he says fifty words.”

“Barely,” Blaine muttered.

Kurt rubbed the block of Parmesan cheese a little bit more roughly over the grater.

“It’s not just the talking,” Blaine said. “It’s the staring at walls and the way he pets textures over and over. How he sometimes doesn’t make eye contact and he doesn’t seem to smile as much as the other kids we know.”

“He’s fine,” Kurt said. “He’s learning. He’s clearly very smart.” It was true. He could recognize all his colors and shapes and hundreds of animals and objects, even if he didn’t say the word he would point to the one someone else said and he was right every time. He built fantastic structures out of blocks and he could put together a wooden puzzle in no time flat. The other kids his age that they knew didn’t do anything close to that.

“But what if—”

Kurt cut Blaine’s sentence off. “No, Blaine,” he said, finally turning to look straight at his husband. “I don’t want some social worker coming in here and judging our family and our parenting and telling us how to raise our kid.”

“That’s not what it’s about!” Blaine objected.

“I get him. I get him.” Kurt’s hand trembled, and he set the block of cheese back down on the counter. “I wasn’t ‘normal’ when I was a kid, either, and I wouldn’t have wanted someone trying to make me normal. I wasn’t exactly like Colin is, but I was different too. He’s not sick, he’s just different. Let him be who he is. He’s not hurting anyone.”

Blaine nodded slowly. “Okay,” he whispered. “We can wait and see.”

They’d have this conversation again, they both knew. Kurt reached out and took Blaine’s left hand in his right, and they stood side by side, watching Colin across the room as he stroked the wall, over and over again.