I slid the fork through the tip of the cake as I answered him. “Not even a little bit. I had a bad dream and figured I might as well come down here and get a slice while you finished up.” We both knew I still struggled going back to sleep on nights like these, but usually I woke him up when I did or stretched out on the bed until I could press up against him to relax so that I could fall asleep again. He never minded, and honestly, our best conversations were always in moments like those, when we could tell each other things that weren’t so easy or pretty.
His answer was a grumble as I held the fork up to his mouth and he took a bite.
“Thank you for everything,” I told him as I slipped the fork out of his mouth, looking at those pink lips for a second longer than I needed to, before dipping the tines back through the cake and scooping more into my own mouth.
Man, it was delicious.
A big, warm hand landed on the middle of my back and gave it a circle. “You have a good time tonight?” he asked quietly.
I nodded at him and smiled before swallowing.
All of our coworkers and their girlfriends or wives had come, some of their kids, had too. Mr. Cooper and Lydia. My sisters and their boyfriends. Lenny and her gang. And even two of Rip’s friends and their ladies.
Rip and Lydia had made all the food. He’d made the cake. Lily had bought the snacks. Lenny and Mr. Cooper the drinks.
All to celebrate my birthday. In the house that I had bought, and that over the years, Rip and I had fixed up even more. A house that was under both of our names now. A house that we had made even more of a home together. A place where our little baby daughter woke up in the middle of the night and her daddy got up to feed her or change her diaper or just snuggle her like it was the greatest honor.
He never woke me up to help, but half the time, the monitor told me what was going on anyway. Most of those nights, especially if he left the little device in the room, I just lay in bed and listened to him talk to her, patiently, with so much love it felt like I’d burst. It wasn’t hard at all for me to accept he was such a great dad.
I mean, before things had gone to hell, Mr. C had been a great father to him. Rip had told me stories here and there of the things they had done while his mom had still been alive. He’d had a great role model.
Things between him and Mr. Cooper weren’t great, but they weren’t bad either. It might have helped that after Mr. C’s heart attack, he had taken to working half the hours he had before, only doing scheduling. They had even hired another mechanic too, to help out Rip since he had to take over more of what Mr. Cooper did.
They hardly argued anymore. They didn’t agree half the time, but they didn’t fight. I doubted I would ever see them hug or talk about anything that wasn’t work or family-related, but it was something. I’d even seen Rip pat Lydia on the back twice.
If that wasn’t something I didn’t know what was.
So right then, I leaned over and kissed him right on the mouth. “Every year is the best birthday ever.”
Rip didn’t smile as I pulled away from him, but he watched me with those eyes, and I wondered what he was thinking. But when his hand slipped underneath the back of my black tank top, those fingers I knew like the back of my hand, giving my bare skin another rub, I stopped thinking about everything else. The cloud of bad birthdays before hovering in the dark corner of my head, the dream, my sisters in the other room, how lucky I was, just… everything.
At least, I stopped thinking about everything for the ten seconds he waited to say in that quiet, quiet voice, “I’m gonna give you your birthday present now.”
That had me raising my eyebrows again. “Right here where anyone can walk in?”
He had a grin on his face as he rolled his eyes and shoved the stool back, getting to his bare feet and circling around the island toward the cabinets above the refrigerator. He opened them easily, pulling out a shoebox-sized thing wrapped in white paper with blue ribbon.
I didn’t need to ask to know he’d wrapped it himself. He always did and he never half-assed it. Not ever.
He closed it and turned around to head back toward me, a funny expression on that handsome face. “What? You’d never look up there. It’s only pots and pans.”
Years and countless cooking lessons with Rip later, and I still hadn’t gotten much better at it.
He didn’t take a seat again as he set the box down right beside what was left of the cake we were sharing.
I smiled up at him as I undid the ribbon and tore open the wrapping paper as quietly as possible. It wasn’t a shoebox but just a regular gift box with a lid on top. “I’m going to be pretty excited if you got me a new respirator,” I told him as I lifted it and set it aside.
If I thought it was weird that he didn’t chuckle, I didn’t think much of it, because the pictures in the box stole every thought out of my head.
I knew I was lucky. I knew that life had worked out in a way that I never would have even dared imagining. I knew that I had so much love in me, I would fight to the death for it.
I was fully aware that I wouldn’t change a single thing that had ever happened in my life because it had all gotten me here. With this man. With this life. With these people that I loved and loved me back.
But as I looked down at the stack of pictures in that box, I wasn’t sure whether to be excited or just a little devastated.
Because I had never seen the face looking back up at me. Not once.
But I knew whom it belonged to. Somehow. Some way. I knew.
The woman couldn’t have been any older than eighteen. She was sitting in a pose with a purple gown and cap on, holding a fake diploma in one hand, her expression tight but smiling. Light olive-skinned. Medium-haired. She didn’t have the Miller green eyes, but why would she?
“Know who it is?” Rip asked quietly, setting his hand back on my spine.
I gulped and barely managed to get out, “My mom, right?”
That big hand went up and down before he confirmed, “Yeah, baby. It’s your mom.”
I pulled the top picture off and stared down at the next one. It was another graduation picture with a different background, with her sitting in a different position, still smiling tightly at the camera like she would rather be anywhere else.
It was my mom. My mom.
“Took me three years to find this. She was on the drill team for a year. Supposedly she was really good at art, but she didn’t like school much,” he spoke quietly. “You two look a lot alike, I think.”
I flipped to another picture to find the same woman sitting in a drill team uniform, that same expression on her face.
It was my mom.
“She left home right after graduation and no one knew where she went,” Rip kept talking. “No one knew she passed away. They didn’t know about you or your brother. I thought for sure they were making it up, but they weren’t, Luna, baby. I could tell they weren’t. They had no idea about you…”
I had to swallow. Press my lips together. Blink because my eyes started burning all of a sudden, and I didn’t know what to do. Flicking my gaze up, my hand went to his—to that hand I held every chance I had—, and I asked him before I could think twice about it. “Who is they?”
Lucas Ripley leaned down and brushed his mouth over mine, then pulled back, his free hand going to my cheek. “Your mom’s family, baby. If you want to meet them, you’ve got a grandma and an aunt staying at a hotel, right now, a couple miles away that would really love to see you tomorrow.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah.” His thumb brushed my cheek again. “You all right with that?” he asked softly, with tenderness in that rough voice. “You okay with making the family just a little bigger by meeting them?”
You’d have figured he would have gotten used to my hugs over the years, but he hadn’t. He still sighed into my neck like it was something new, and wrapped his arms around me as tight as ever when I threw my arms around him suddenly. Squeezing him tightly. Squeezing him like he meant the world to me and had made my life ten times better by just existing. By just being the person that he was.
I was seriously the luckiest person in the world.