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I froze.

“Sophie told me yesterday that she saved the password because her mother knew that you would try to erase not only the memories of her but every Halloween and every other major holiday from your lives once she was gone, and she wanted Sophie to still have access to all the joyful parts. Now, don’t you dare stand here and tell me this is all about me trying to emotionally manipulate you. This is about a seven-year-old girl who deserves to have Halloween, Christmas, and any other holiday she wants, even if you’ve decided you don’t. If you want to talk about emotional manipulation, how about we start with what you’ve been doing to Sophie?”

Ember’s eyes were wild as she stood there staring at me. The longer I looked at her, the more I realized she was right and I really had nothing to say to her about any of it.

“Rebecca gave her the password,” I said, my voice sounding like it belonged to someone else.

“SophieSunshine, Capital S, capital S, number of your house,” I said, repeating what Sophie had told me.

I pressed the heel of my hand against my sternum as pain shot through my chest. “I didn’t know.”

“She misses her mom, Everett, and she loves you more than you can imagine. She needs these holidays; she needs to find joy again in these things.”

I nodded once, then turned, and without another word made my way back upstairs to my bedroom. I closed the door. As much as I hated to admit it to myself, Ember was right. I was the one who’d taken the holidays from my daughter. I went to the bathroom and took a long, hot shower, allowing myself to calm down. I owed Ember an apology. When I finally came downstairs again, dressed and composed, Sophie was awake, eating cereal at the island in the kitchen. She was chatting away to Ember about a dinosaur she’d read about.

As I entered the kitchen, Sophie went quiet, looking over at me, no doubt bracing herself for my reaction to the decorations, which made me flinch. I never knew she looked at me that way.

“The potted mum is a pleasant touch,” I said, kissing the top of Sophie’s head.

Sophie’s entire body relaxed, and she smiled and went right back to eating her cereal.

Ember looked at me across the kitchen.

“I am sorry about this morning.” I said to her as I poured myself a cup of coffee. She didn’t smile; she just looked at me with those warm brown eyes, settling something inside of me.

I spent my day trying to work. What I ended up doing instead was watching Ember.

She had set herself up at the kitchen counter again with her laptop, and I positioned myself at the kitchen table watching her because apparently, I’d lost all pretense of subtlety. Sophie was taking part in her online coding class on her tablet, headphones on, occasionally whispering to herself.

Ember sat there, working away on whatever it was she was writing. She was completely absorbed in whatever scene she was working on. Her fingers flew over the keys. I’d noticed that her expression was a direct correlation to whatever was happening on the screen, and when she wrote dialogue, her lips moved slightly. When she was writing action, she leaned forward, and when she was writing love scenes…she bit her bottom lip and her cheeks flushed.

I tried to focus on the screen in front of me but kept glancing over at Ember. She was beautiful, and she was the first one who didn’t put up with my shit, the same way Rebecca wouldn’t have. When I glanced over again, I saw her bite her lower lip, tugging it between her teeth as her eyebrows drew together in concentration, her cheeks flushed. She shifted in her seat, pressing her thighs together.

Fuck me, I was going to lose my mind.

By dinner, I had accomplished roughly a third of what I normally would have if I had been behind the closed door of my office. The constant hum of awareness that centered on Ember hadn’t helped.

Once dinner was done and Sophie’s bedtime routine was finished, the house went quiet. I poured myself a scotch and sat in my office, trying to draft an email to Mark.

I heard a thump from the living room, followed by a muffled “Ow.” I frowned, closed my laptop, and made my way into the living room.

I found Ember on the living room floor, surrounded by pieces of an unassembled dollhouse. She had an instruction manual spread across her lap, a screwdriver in one hand, and a look of fury on her face.

“Step fourteen says to attach bracket A to support beam C using fastener kit seven, there is no fastener kit seven. There are six kits. I have counted them four times and gone through everything.” She muttered to herself, turning each of the bags over that lay in front of her.

I glanced at the pieces and kits she’d arranged on the floor. I saw half-assembled walls, a tiny staircase clearly meant to connect the second floor to the first floor, which didn’t seem to exist yet, and millions of small plastic pieces scattered across the living room rug.

“Is this for Sophie?” I asked.

Ember jumped, dropping the piece she held in her hand, and looked at me over her shoulder.

“God, you scared me,” she said, bringing her hand to her chest.

“Sorry. I didn’t mean to. So, what do we have here?” I questioned, moving to her side and squatting down, flipping each of the bags over again.

“It’s for Sophie, yes. I ordered it the first week I got here. She has all those little dolls upstairs she loves to play with but no house, so I thought it might be an acceptable gift from you for her birthday in November. I planned to put it together without bothering you because I figured I could handle it. I have a college degree and have assembled plenty of IKEA furniture in my short lifetime,” she giggled, holding up a piece of wood smaller than a playing card. “This is supposed to be a balcony. It appears to have twelve screws. Twelve. For a balcony smaller than my phone,” she said, dropping it into a pile of other pieces.

I chuckled and then took my watch off and set it on the table. I sat down across from her.