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I’d made the same wish every birthday since 1985.

The first time, I’d been pregnant with Claire, standing alone in the kitchen of our first house with one grocery-store cupcake and a candle from the junk drawer. Paul had been delayed at work that night. I was wearing one of his old shirts because nothing else fit, and I’d laughed at myself before blowing out the flame.

Please. Let me do it over.

At thirty, the wish had stopped being funny.

At forty, it had become my private ritual.

By fifty, it was the one thing I never told anyone as I made the wish each year.

Please. Let me do it over.

Not just because of Dean, although his face had followed me through the years in flashes. Dark hair falling into his eyes. His hands turning a record sleeve over with care. The way he’d looked at me across the country-club ballroom the night I accepted Paul’s proposal.

It was the girl I’d been before that night who haunted me. She’d laughed loudly, wanted things without first measuring whether anyone else approved. She’d worked in a record store because she loved music, drove too fast with the top down, and believed life might become something interesting and entirely her own without considering what anyone else thought she should do.

In the end, she’d chosen the life everyone expected her to.

It had been a good life. It had simply grown quieter around me year by year until sometimes I couldn’t remember whether I’d become sensible or merely small.

“Mom,” Claire prompted. “We’re losing wax.”

I opened my eyes and blew as most of the candles went out in one smoky rush. Two stubborn flames survived near the center.

Ben leaned across the table. “I’ve got you.”

He blew them out, cheeks puffing slightly, and for one impossible second he was nine again. His hair stuck up in the back, his arm was wrapped in a blue cast, and he still believed I could fix anything.

The restaurant applauded, because everyone loved a celebration, and they were probably relieved not to be the woman aging in public.

A woman near the window raised her wineglass. “Happy birthday!”

I smiled and waved as smoke from the candles curled above the cake.

Another song came through the speakers, Madonna this time, as Paul’s hand rested lightly on the back of my chair.

He’d rocked Claire to that song when she was a baby, walking slow circles across the living-room carpet while Casey Kasem talked softly from the radio in the kitchen. Claire had been asleep against his shoulder, one tiny fist tangled in the collar of his shirt as he’d glanced at me over her head and smiled.

For years, I’d remembered that night whenever I felt restless. There had been love in that room. Exhausted, milk-stained, ordinary love.

Paul leaned down and kissed the top of my head. Not my lips or my cheek. My hair. He’d always kissed me as if we were English aristocracy in some kind of historical novel.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I’m wonderful.”

“You don’t look fifty.”

I rolled my eyes. “That isn’t a compliment. It’s a maintenance report.”

Ben choked on his water as Claire pointed at me. “That. That’s the birthday energy I wanted.”

“I’m full of energy. And soon, hopefully, I’ll be full of cake.”

The waiter finished removing the candles and cut the ganache. Claire photographed my first bite, rejected the picture because I looked startled, then made me do it again.

“No event has happened,” I said, “unless you have six pictures of it.”