Page 86 of Grumpy Lumberjack’s Secret

“HAPPY BIRTHDAY!” we shouted.

All four of us. At the same time. Dollie clapping. Josh raising the plates. Emma bouncing on her toes with the cake swaying dangerously. And me. I smiled. The real one. The one that I was learning to give more freely because of the woman standing in front of me.

Her hand went to her mouth. Her eyes filled with tears and her chin trembled and she stood there in the doorway in my flannel shirt and looked at us with an expression that broke me open.

“I forgot my own birthday,” she said.

Her voice cracked. The tears spilled over and she pressed both hands to her face and cried, and the sight of her standing there crying because four people had baked her a lopsided cake and hung a crooked banner hit me in the chest with a force that was harder than any punch I had ever taken.

Dollie reached her first. Pulled her into a hug. “That is the point. You forgot, so we remembered for you.”

“The cake has a dinosaur,” Emma said, holding it up. “I made the dinosaur. Papa made the cake but I did all the important parts.”

Josh set down the plates. Put his hand on her shoulder. Squeezed once. Said nothing. Josh.

I walked to her. Through the balloons and around the table and past the banner that was, I will admit, leaning to the left. I stopped in front of her and she looked up at me with those blue eyes full of tears and I lifted my good hand and wiped them from her cheeks with my thumb.

“Happy birthday, Chloe,” I said.

She threw her arms around me. Her face pressed into my chest and the sound she made, a sob that was not sad but was the opposite of sad, vibrated through my ribs and settled somewhere near my heart. I held her with my good arm and let her cry and did not say anything because some moments did not need words. They just needed presence.

“Thank you,” she whispered against my chest. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“You are getting snot on my shirt,” I said.

She laughed. Pulled back. Wiped her face. Looked at all of us with the kind of expression that made the four in the morning wake-up and the egg on the floor and the throbbing shoulder worth every second.

“Okay,” she said. “I want cake for breakfast.”

“That is the plan,” Dollie said.

“And I want the piece with the dinosaur.”

“That is my dinosaur,” Emma protested.

“It is my birthday.”

Emma weighed this with the gravity of a judge presiding over a constitutional matter. Then she nodded.

“You can have half the dinosaur.”

“Deal.”

Josh cut the cake because I could not with one arm and Dollie claimed she would eat it before she could serve it and Emma was too short to reach across the table. The cake was chocolate. Dense and slightly uneven and frosted with more love than skill, and I watched Chloe take her first bite and close her eyes and I knew that if I never built another thing in my life, this cake, this ridiculous lopsided cake made at four in the morning with one arm and a six-year-old decorator, would be my greatest achievement.

“Who made this?” Chloe asked with her mouth full.

“Papa did,” Emma said proudly. “He woke up really early. He broke two eggs on the floor. Dollie said a bad word.”

“I said fudge,” Dollie corrected.

“You did not say fudge.”

“Emma Matthews, I said fudge and that is the official record.”

I ate my cake and watched Chloe. Watched her laugh with frosting on her fingers. Watched her lean into Dollie when Dollie made a joke. Watched her look at Emma with the kind of love that made the air around them glow. And I felt something settle inside me, something that had been restless for a very long time, clicking into place like the last piece of a joint fitting flush.

Dollie had brought gifts. A scarf she had knitted, blue wool with an uneven pattern that she called artistic. A romance novel with a shirtless lumberjack on the cover that she presented with a grin and a pointed look at me. I looked at the cover. Looked at Dollie. Held her gaze until she started laughing and Chloe nearly choked on her cake.