He returns at seven with a white box and sets it on my desk.
"You're quite the romantic," he says dryly.
"You can handle the Fremont run tonight," I reply, not looking up from the contract I'm reviewing.
"That's a four-hour operation."
"You brought Gloria here on purpose didn't you?"
He sighs. "Have fun," he says, with a sincerity so false I almost chuckle. He walks out mumbling and I open the box.
The cake is dark chocolate, simply decorated, the kind of thing a good bakery produces without fuss. I look at it for a moment and I think about whether she will like chocolate and I realize I don't know and I think I want to know.
I find the candles in the kitchen drawer, the kind kept for power cuts, and I push several into the frosting and light them and I carry the box out to the garden where I saw her walk to a few hours ago.
She is on the stone bench with her knees pulled up and her face tipped toward the last of the evening light. The red dress again, the paint mostly washed off her hands now. She doesn't hear me until I am almost beside her and when she turns and sees the candles her face does something I am unprepared for.
It opens completely, without any of the careful management she usually applies to her expressions around me. She looked young and unguarded and lit from the inside.
"Happy birthday, princess," I tell her.
She looks at the cake and back at me and her eyes are bright. "No birthday song?"
"Don't push it."
She pouts and blows the candles out and scoops a fingerful of frosting directly from the cake and puts it in her mouth and her eyes close briefly. Then she scoops another and holds it out toward me.
I look at her hand.
"Go on," she says.
I lean forward and take the frosting from her fingers which I immediately regret. Her fingers stay in my mouth and despite my best judgment, my tongue swirls around it then she turns red and pulls away.
We sit on the bench with the cake between us.
"Why didn't you say anything?" I ask.
She considers the question with more genuine thought than it probably requires. "I never really celebrated it. I'd get things, sometimes, presents left on the hall table, a week after the actual date usually. No card." She picks at the edge of the cake box. "After a while, I just stopped thinking of it as a day that meant anything. It's easier to forget it than to wait for something that doesn't come."
I say nothing.
"Don't look at me like that," she adds.
"Like what?"
"Like that." She glances up briefly. "I'm fine. It's just a birthday."
"It's your birthday," I reply. "Life is short enough. It's okay to celebrate it with your friends."
"I've never had friends to celebrate with." She says it without self-pity, which makes it worse somehow. "My father didn't allow it. He was worried about the wrong people getting close to him through me, about embarrassing information getting out, about — it doesn't matter. My cousin was the only one ever permitted near me and she doesn't like me very much."
She looks at the extinguished candles.
"How do you want to celebrate?" I ask. "Tonight."
She turns to look at me and my eyes involuntarily fall to her lips. They are full and supple with a hint of icing on them. Do I wipe it off? I shrug the idea off and look away.
"I always wanted to go dancing," she says finally. "My mother used to take me when I was little. I don't really remember the specifics but I remember the feeling of it."
