Page 40 of Untamed Hunter Daddy

“The scar is from the frame. A piece of torn metal caught me when the weight shifted, entered above the hip and tore forward about four inches. Mason packed it with combat gauze and kept returning fire. Medevac got us out twenty minutes later. Herrera survived. Two of the six in the Humvee didn’t. I spent three weeks in a field hospital and six months in physical therapy learning how to use the muscles the frame tore through.”

“I kept the photograph. Herrera came to see me in the hospital and I tried to give it back. He told me to keep it. Said the photo was in the dirt when I reached him and I picked it up and put it in my pocket before I started lifting, and that meant it was supposed to stay with the man who lifted. It’s in the locked drawer of the desk.”

She’s quiet for a moment.

“Herrera. Is he okay now?”

“He’s a firefighter in El Paso. Sends me a Christmas card every year. The daughter’s seven now. Lost the gap in her teeth but still has the pigtails.”

Zoe makes a small sound against my chest.

“Your turn,” I say.

She’s quiet for a long time. The embers shift in the fireplace.

“My mother’s birthday was March fourteenth,” she says. “The first one after she died, I didn’t know what to do. It was a Saturday. The diner was closed. I’d been living in Timber Creek about two months and didn’t know anyone well enough to have plans. Greta had invited me to dinner earlier that week but I told her I was busy because I was twenty and telling someone you had no plans on a Saturday felt like confessing to a crime.”

“I bought a cake from the grocery store. Sheet cake with white frosting and pink flowers, the kind they make for kids’ parties. I asked them to write Happy Birthday on it. The woman behind the counter asked who it was for and I said my mom, and she smiled and piped the letters in pink cursive.”

Her voice is steady. Too steady.

“I brought it home and put it on the kitchen table and lit a candle and sang the whole song. Out loud. In an empty apartment. To a woman buried in a cemetery in Cedar Falls that I couldn’t afford to visit because the drive was seven hours and I didn’t have enough gas money for both ways.”

“When the song was done I blew out the candle and cut a piece and ate it standing at the counter because sitting at the table alone felt worse. The cake was terrible. Too sweet, too dry. The pink letters were already melting. I ate one piece and put the rest in the refrigerator. It sat there six days until I threw it away because I couldn’t eat any more of it and I couldn’t throw it away because throwing away my mother’s birthday cake felt like throwing away my mother.”

She stops. The room holds the story.

“I didn’t tell anyone. Not Greta. Not Mr. Henderson. Not the woman at the grocery store. Nobody knew. I went to my shift on Monday and smiled and refilled coffee and carried plates and not one person in that town knew I’d spent Saturday night singing happy birthday and eating bad cake and crying so hard.”

I don’t say anything. There’s nothing that wouldn’t diminish it.

This is what Tyler saw. Not a shy waitress. A person made of loneliness so complete that any attention felt like love and any connection felt like rescue.

I pull her closer. “March fourteenth,” I say.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll remember.”

Three words. A date on a calendar. A promise that the next March fourteenth, and every one after it, will include a man who knows what it means and will be present for it.

She presses her face into my chest. The sound she makes is small and grateful. Something behind my sternum finally gives way.

I don’t say the words yet. Not tonight. She’s given me her deepest hurt and I won’t make her hold mine on top of it. But the feeling is there. Complete and unambiguous. Built from a birthday cake and a gap-toothed photograph and the sound of my name against her skin and a greenhouse that hasn’t been built yet but will be.

The fire dies. The cabin sleeps. In the locked drawer a photograph of a little girl with pigtails keeps watch beside a sketchbook with a drawing of a hand that belongs to the woman in my arms.

Both of them wait for morning.

21

Ryker

The birds go quiet at 14:23.

I’m on the porch doing the afternoon perimeter scan that’s become ritual since the tracks. Coffee in my left hand, rifle on the railing within reach. The sky is clear for the first time in days, pale blue and sharp. The temperature has dropped since morning, which usually makes the jays louder and the chickadees busier.

But they’ve gone quiet. All of them. The Steller’s jays in the pines to the south have stopped screaming. The chickadees that work the branch near the generator lean-to are gone. The nutcracker that hammers the same dead limb every afternoon is silent.