Chapter 2
“Don’t sign his name this year.”
Sophie spoke quietly, but the friend beside her immediately pulled her hand away from the cake knife.
I stared at the gift she had pushed back toward me.
I had chosen the silver wrapping paper, ordered the necklace, and signed my own name inside the card. The line beneath it was still blank.
My mother was the first to stand.
“It’s getting late,” she said, gathering her coat. “Let’s give Sophie some time with her family.”
The guests understood. They hugged Sophie, thanked me for dinner, and left without mentioning Rachel’s livestream. No one touched Mark’s chair.
After the final car backed out of the driveway, I closed the front door.
Half-eaten food covered the table. Eighteen burned candles lay beside the cake, their wax hardened against the white tablecloth.
“I can explain,” I said.
Sophie slipped her phone into her pocket. “Are you going to explain why he didn’t come, or why you lied for him again?”
All my usual answers crowded into my throat. David’s dying request. Rachel raising a child alone. Ethan growing up without a father. Mark only trying to keep a promise.
I had used every one of them before.
Sophie went upstairs. A few minutes later, she returned carrying an old shoebox and set it on the table.
Inside were eleven birthday cards.
The card on top showed a bear in a party hat, its edges worn soft. It was from her seventh birthday, the first one Mark had missed. Rachel had recently lost her husband, and Ethan had cried all night. Mark said he couldn’t leave them.
I remembered sitting at this table with a blue pen and writing:
I’m sorry Dad couldn’t make it home. Love you always.
Sophie placed the card in front of me. Then she pulled out another.
Her eighth birthday. Mark had taken Ethan to a father-son camping trip.
Her ninth. Rachel’s car had broken down on the highway.
Her tenth. Ethan had his first baseball tryout.
Different colors. Different pictures. Different years.
The same handwriting.
“You bought the gifts too, didn’t you?” Sophie asked.
“Your father paid for them.”
“That isn’t what I asked. Who chose them?”
“I did.”
“Who remembered what I wanted?”
“I did.”
“And who made me call him afterward to say thank you?”
That question stopped me.
Every year, I had handed her the phone. Mark would ask whether she liked her gift, and I would stand nearby until she said yes.
“I didn’t want you to think he’d forgotten.”
Sophie looked down at the cards. Her finger rested on a small heart I had drawn beside Mark’s name. The right side was always slightly uneven.
“I figured it out when I was twelve,” she said. “You draw the same heart on my lunch bags.”
I remembered that birthday. Ethan had sprained his ankle during a travel-team tournament, and Mark had stayed with him at the hospital. Sophie opened her gift but refused to call him.
I thought she was getting older and had stopped caring about birthdays.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“What would you have done?” she asked. “Admitted he didn’t buy anything, or made up another excuse?”
I had no answer.
Sophie returned the eleven cards to the box, leaving tonight’s card on the table, the line beneath my name still blank.
“I kept them because you wrote them,” she said. “You were the one who remembered.”
That didn’t make me feel better.
She carried the box upstairs, pausing beside Mark’s empty chair.
“Stop making me thank him for things you did, Mom.”
Her bedroom door closed.
Headlights swept across the dining room and lit the blank line beneath my name.
The front door opened.
Mark walked in with gold confetti clinging to his coat. In his hands was half a blue-and-white sheet cake bearing Ethan’s team logo.
“You’re still awake?” He set it on the table. “I brought dessert.”