Page 42 of Falling For You

"Sorry to bother you," Wyatt said. "Birdie wanted to come say hi."

Birdie was holding a bouquet of white daisies, wrapped in brown paper.

"These are for you," she said. "I picked them out myself."

"You did?"

"Yes. I picked the white ones because they're the prettiest." She thrust them closer to my face. "Do you like them?"

"We passed by Daphne's shop on the way home," Wyatt said. "Birdie asked if she could buy flowers for the princess cop across the street."

I smiled. The princess cop. She'd called me that on Halloween. It took me a second to realize she meant the braid. The coiled bun she'd seen at the school event, the one she told me looked twisty at the back. To a six-year-old who'd only ever seen women in fairy tales wear their hair like that, a cop with a braid was a princess.

I took the bouquet from her carefully. The flowers were small and a little lopsided where she'd squeezed the stems too hard.

"I love them. Thank you, Birdie."

She beamed.

I don't think anyone had ever given me flowers before. My father was a man who showed love through dinner on the table and books on the shelf, but flowers wouldn't have occurred to him. Elliot didn't do flowers. Elliot didn't do anything that wasn't about Elliot. The first person to hand me a bouquet was a little girl who saw them at a store and decided they belonged to me.

"We just came from the bakery," Birdie said. "Daddy bought my favorite pie. Do you want some?"

I looked at Wyatt. He shrugged, like the invitation was Birdie's and he was just the guy carrying the groceries. I looked at Birdie. She was staring up at me with those wide blue eyes, and the answer was already decided before I opened my mouth.

"I'd love to."

Wyatt's house was warm and lived-in. Birdie's drawings covered the fridge. A tea set was arranged on the coffee table in front of a row of stuffed animals, like they'd been in the middle of something before the bakery run.

Birdie pulled me to the kitchen table while Wyatt cut the pie. She started before the plates were down.

"What do princess cops do?"

I bit back a laugh and glanced at Wyatt. He gave me a small nod. Just go with it.

"Well, I drive around the city and make sure everyone's safe. And when something bad happens, I go to where it happened and try to figure out what's going on."

"Do you look for clues?"

I smiled. "I do. I look at everything really carefully and write it all down."

Birdie's eyes went wide. "So you're like a detective? Like Nancy Drew?"

Something about that hit harder than it should have.

"Not yet," I said. "But I'm working on it."

"Are you going to be one?"

"That's the plan."

She smiled. "I like Nancy Drew."

And then she told me everything. Nancy Drew and her two best friends, Bess and George. How they solved mysteries together. The clue inside the pumpkin. The mystery at the birthday party. She talked with her hands, counting the books on her fingers, telling me about ones she hadn't finished yet but she "already knew how they ended."

I almost laughed. Five years of working toward detective and I thought I had all the motivation I needed. Now a six-year-old with a ponytail thought I was Nancy Drew, and I wasn't about to let her find out I wasn't.

Wyatt sat across the table with his coffee and let his daughter run the whole conversation. Every question, every tangent, every pivot. He didn't interrupt, didn't redirect, didn't check his phone. There was something about this version of Wyatt Brooks. He was gentle, patient, completely wrapped around his daughter's finger. It made him more attractive than he had any right to be.