Page 51 of Falling For You

Birdie's fairy circle was already taking shape by the time we finished. She'd arranged a ring of stones near the fire pit, each one carefully selected and placed. She was explaining to a nearby lizard which rocks were magic and which ones were just regular, and the lizard appeared to be listening.

We hiked after lunch. Wyatt picked the trail, a loop he and Birdie had done before, red sandstone and easy scrambling with a view at the top. Birdie took off ahead of us the second we hit the trailhead, her water bottle bouncing against her hip.

"Daddy, look at this rock."

"That's a good one."

"It has sparkles in it."

"Mica," Wyatt said.

"I'm keeping it."

She kept every rock. Her pockets were full within ten minutes, so she started handing them to Wyatt, who put them in his without complaint. When she found one too big for either of their pockets, she handed it to me, warm, covered in dirt, held out with both hands and serious eyes.

"That one might be magic," she said. "Hold it careful."

The trail steepened after the first mile. Birdie scrambled ahead on the sandstone and Wyatt stayed close behind her. He lifted her onto a boulder that came up to her chest, his hands under her arms, easy, and set her down on top. She kept climbing. His shirt pulled across his shoulders every time he reached up to steady her, and I stopped pretending I wasn't looking.

The trail got rocky after that. Birdie slowed down, picking her way between loose stones. Wyatt swung her onto his shoulders without breaking stride. She wrapped her hands around his forehead and told him to go faster.

Near the overlook, there was a ledge. Wyatt lifted Birdie off his shoulders and boosted her up. She scrambled over the top and disappeared. He turned back to me and reached down.

I looked at his hand.

I took it.

His grip was warm and solid and he pulled me up like I weighed nothing. At the top, we were standing close enough that I could see the sunburn starting on the bridge of his nose. And then Birdie yelled "Come look at this!" from somewhere ahead of us and we stepped apart.

The view at the top was worth the climb. Red rock in every direction, the desert floor stretched out below us. Las Vegas looked like a gray shimmer on the horizon. Birdie sat on a flat rock and pulled every stone out of her pockets and sorted them by color. Wyatt handed her a granola bar. She ate it without looking up from the sorting.

We built the fire after sunset. Wyatt set a grill grate over the pit and laid out hot dogs while I opened the cooler and pulled out buns, ketchup, and a bag of chips. Birdie appointed herself in charge of buns.

"Two for me," she said, lining them up on a paper plate.

"One for you," Wyatt said.

"One and a half."

"One."

She accepted this but her face said the negotiation wasn't over. She squeezed ketchup onto each bun in a careful line down the center, inspected it, corrected it, approved it. Wyatt rotated the hot dogs on the grate and I wrapped corn in foil and set it on the coals. Birdie narrated the entire operation.

We ate on paper plates in our laps. Birdie talked through the hike like we hadn't been there. The mica rock, the lizard she was sure lived under the big boulder, the view from the top, the way Daddy almost stepped on a cactus.

"I did not almost step on a cactus," Wyatt said.

"You did. I saw it."

He looked at me. I shrugged. "She was closer. Better vantage point."

His mouth twitched. Birdie loaded a marshmallow onto her stick and started rotating it with more patience than she applied to anything else in her life.

"This one is perfect. Look! It's golden."

She blew it out and ate it in one bite, then loaded another.

The sky was enormous above us. Desert dark, no city light, nothing but the fire, the stars, and Birdie's voice filling the space between them.