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“Good. Now, I’ll text you the list, and if you have issues setting it up, FaceTime me because we want this to look nice, okay?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At my dry tone, she sighed. “You’re not going to FaceTime me, are you?”
“Probably not.”
Adaline let out a disgruntled groan. “Okay, well… if I send you pictures, will you at least try to make it cute?”
“Trying is about all I can do right now. Thanks, Adaline.”
“Love you,” she said.
“You too.”
Within a few minutes, the promised text came through on my phone, and I let out a huge, slow breath. “Good Lord,” I muttered. “What did I do?”
By the time Harlow’s car pulled into the driveway, I was ready to shove everything out of sight, pretend I’d never called my sister, that I didn’t give two shits about how this evening went, and I was also maybe sweating. Just a little.
To appease my sister, I’d snapped and sent one picture. It helped a little in that whole I-think-I’m-gonna-puke feeling.
Adaline: OH MY GOSH, IAN! That’s so cute, I could scream!! The little popcorn buckets with candy! The balloons that match the blankets!!!! I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU MATCHED THE BALLOONS!
Me: Please, please stop with the exclamation points, I beg you.
Adaline: Sorry. But you did SO GOOD. She will love it. Best birthday present ever.
And it was all those exclamation points that kept me even the slightest bit sane when Harlow and Sage walked into the house and then stopped short at how the family room had been transformed.
An odd pressure slid around my ribs and squeezed in the vacuum of silence that followed. At first, she didn’t say anything. Her hand fluttered up to her chest and settled there as her mouth hung open.
Sage just grinned and held out a fist toward me.
In the middle of the room, I’d pushed together a queen-size air mattress and a twin, the larger for them. Heaped along the back of each, using the couch as a headrest, were mounds of white and pink pillows. Over the air mattresses, I’d laid down a frankly ridiculous amount of fuzzy white blankets and one overly large pink one on their side. Tall columns of pink, rose gold, and white balloons flanked the TV screen, where I’d cued up her favorite movie—The Cutting Edge.
“What the hell?” Harlow whispered.
“This is so cool,” Sage breathed.
When Harlow finally moved her eyes back to me, they were glossy with tears, and that was before she caught sight of the perfect chocolate cake sitting in the middle of the table. There was one candle in the middle, and the smooth coat of frosting around it was only interrupted by a line of perfectly piped pink tulips along the base.
“Ian,” she whispered.
I cleared my throat, shifting a little on my feet, crossing my arms over my chest just to have something to do with my hands. “Adaline helped me,” I said. “She, uh, she owns an event planning company, so she sent me a really big fucking—um , a really big list of what to get.”
Sage snorted, and Harlow emitted a soft, breathy laugh, only the slightest shake of her head as she continued staring.
“You gave me my dream birthday,” she said so quietly, I almost didn’t hear her.
Almost. Maybe later, I’d think about how it might have felt different if I hadn’t heard her, or if she hadn’t said it. But I did hear, and she knew exactly what I’d done. That doing this for her felt like the only way to make up some penance for being gone for so many of them—each just as important, no matter what number was on the cake. That doing this for her was the only way I knew how to show her that the life she was building for herself was fucking amazing, even if it looked a little different than she’d hoped.
I could hardly meet her knowing gaze. “I missed a lot of them, you know. Just trying to make up for it.”
She didn’t hug me, and I was strangely relieved. With Sage watching us both carefully, it felt like too much. Instead, Harlow walked over to stare at the cake. “Chocolate?” she asked after another eternal silence.
“As much as they could cram in there.”
Harlow’s answering laugh was a little shaky, a little unsteady, and I didn’t miss the way she dashed her hand across her cheek.
