Page 120 of Scars We Didn't See

Not a surprise birthday party, huh? Sure.

Poppy waited on the top step. She was barely two, but that tiny girl was the spitting image of her mama. Dark curls sprang up everywhere, and she was all dolled up in her sparkly tutu dress, her chubby belly jutting out. She twisted back and forth in her party shoes and frilly white socks, her dark eyes already on me. Little devil.

She grinned a toothy smile and raised her hands.

I bent down to her. “Want something, little one?”

She punched her fists about her head. She didn’t say much—more like her daddy—but I knew she was asking me to pick her up. She loved having a front-row seat for all the action, and no one could get her higher or closer than her “Unnie Ay-Yon.”

Poppy stuffed her chubby fingers into my beard, babbling away about who-knows-what as I lumbered inside, then down the hallway. She was like a doll in my arms, propped on my hip, and I paused with her to look at the splashes of colourful photos that Ruth had flooded all over the walls of the Hollyoak farmhouse.

Three years of new memories.

The first photo I looked at was one of the six of us when we’d won Games Night. It was a turning point in my life in so many ways. That was the night I’d finally admitted I loved the girl of my dreams and truly let other people into my life.

And it had been the six of us ever since.

My eyes glanced over the other photos. Ruth and Ryan’s shotgun wedding, once news of jellybean Poppy had shocked us all. The six of us smiling on the beaches of Fiji for that magic week away when Harry and Brooke had eloped. Ruth beaming a proud smile the day she’d started her pony club. Harry and Brooke when they’d bought their first house. Ryan and one of his dumb, hairy cows. Lola holding the keys to the clinic when she’d taken over. And, of course, Poppy. There were truckloads of photos of our Little Miss Poppy.

A smile tugged at my lips when I looked at the newest photo at the end.

Lola and I on our wedding day.

There was nothing fancy about our wedding—just a small shindig at our place on the mountain with a few friends. The wedding was another one of those days when I was told I couldn’t wear jeans, but Harry was the one who convinced me to chuck on the suit.

One of my best friends. My best man. In a lot of ways, the better man. I still teased him about being a kid, but honestly, he was the one who’d helped me grow up in a way no one else could at one of my lowest points.

He was a big part of why that beautiful woman had come wobbling along the grass towards me in her puffy pink tea dress, holding those damn daisies and making me scrub a waterfall of tears off my face because I just felt so…blessed.

No word of a lie—Harry ribbed me so hard because I’d cried more than Yolanda.

That crafty old broad had constantly nagged me and stuck her nose where I didn’t want it. She was convinced right from the start that the love of a good woman was what I needed. She’d said it was the only thing that got her husband through some dark days after he’d come back from the war. For a long time,I’d thought she was full of shit. Turned out, she was right—I just hadn’t met the right woman yet.

Lola was the gift worth waiting for.

And God help me if the waterworks weren’t stinging my eyes all over again when I looked at that photo of us.

Ruth waddled beside me, her belly growing rounder with another Hollyoak on the way. Her head fell onto my shoulder. “That’s my favourite, you know.”

“Really? You like it even more than the one of your grinning husband and his dumb cow?”

She laughed. “Miss Bernice is actually a big deal in the farming world.”

Poppy shoved a flurry of chubby fists at my mouth. I smooched little kisses on each toddler punch. She giggled. “I’ll take your word for it,” I said to Ruth.

“How do you feel now you’re officially forty?”

“Old.”

“You already acted like a grumpy old ass.”

“Old-er.”

Ruth smirked, but it faded, and she was quiet as she glanced over the wall of photos. “Do you remember the night all those years ago when Matthew filed for divorce? The night I tore the house apart? When I chose to move down here to Tasmania?”

My chest squeezed tight, all the breath stolen from my lungs, but I nodded.

“I never thanked you for coming with me,” she said.

“You don’t need to.”

“Iwantto. You were always there for me when no one else was. I know I put on a brave face, but for a long time, I was angry at the world and everything that had been taken from me. My family. My dreams. Butnow…” She turned a wistful gaze to me, her eyes shining with tears, but her lips curved up in a smile. “Aiden, did you ever imagine it would turn out like this?”

No. Not for a damn second.

But when the singing started, and my wife walked towards me holding a birthday cake, her face lit up with a smile even brighter than the sparklers stuck into the top, friends and family crowded behind her, I knew why everything had worked out the way it did.

It was all because of her.

The End