Chapter 5 - Frosting and Small Fingerprints
I got Emma away from the middle of the yard and over to the edge of the cake table, where the white tablecloth hung down to the grass and the pink and white balloons bobbed against their strings.
That was the first time I actually looked at the cake.
Up close it wasn't just ruined. The top tier had slid half off the middle one, and pale blue frosting was smeared sideways in one long drag. A dollop of white had dropped onto the tablecloth and started to melt in the sun. The little plastic number for Sophie sat crooked at the base.
Emma stayed a half step behind my leg. I could feel her hand sweating in mine.
"You stay right here with me," I said. "I'm just going to look."
I crouched down so my eyes were level with the table. From that angle, the smear was higher than I expected. The table itself came up to my hip. Emma barely reached my thigh. To leave that sideways mark, someone would have had to reach across and down hard, palm flat.
I looked at the smear again. There was a partial print in the frosting — not clear, but wide. Wider than Emma's hand. Her fingers were still those tiny five-year-old fingers that could barely wrap around a juice box.
I glanced at the grass under the table. The cloth on the party side was pulled tight, the corner yanked out from under the paper plates. A chair was tipped onto two legs like someone had bumped it.
"Em," I said quietly. "Hold your hands up for me. Like this."
She hesitated, then lifted both hands, palms out. I turned them over.
Clean. No blue, no pink, no white frosting ground into the creases. I checked her thumbs, then under her nails. There was a little dirt from the yard along one knuckle, and a faded marker line on her wrist from school, but nothing sticky.
I looked down at her dress. Pale yellow with those ruffled sleeves. If she had buried her hands in that cake and dragged the top tier sideways, there would have been something on the front, on the sleeves, on the skirt where she'd wiped. There was nothing. Just grass dust near the hem.
My chest eased a fraction, then tightened again. That clean dress meant something, but I knew how it would sound if I said it out loud.
I pulled my phone from my pocket. My hands weren't quite steady.
"I'm just taking pictures so we remember," I told her.
I took three — one wide of the whole table with the balloons and the bounce house behind it, one close of the smeared side, one low showing the height of the table against the grass. The shutter clicks sounded too loud for a backyard.
Emma watched me. "Am I in trouble?" she asked.
"Not with me," I said.
I was lining up a fourth shot, of the pulled tablecloth, when I heard sandals slap fast across the grass behind us.
"What are you doing?" Brook said.
She came around the end of the table and stopped when she saw my phone pointed at the cake. Her face changed.
"Are you serious right now? You're lawyering a kid's birthday party?"
I stood up and slipped the phone back in my pocket. Emma moved closer to my leg.
"I'm looking," I said. "That's all."
"Looking for what? A way out?" She glanced down at Emma, then back at me. "The cake's wrecked, Daniel. Everyone saw her over here."
"Did they?"
Brook let out a breath through her nose. "Don't do this. Don't turn this into some investigation in front of Sophie. She keeps asking when she's getting her cake."
Behind her, near the folding chairs, I could hear the bounce house motor humming and kids yelling inside it. Normal party noise that made this corner feel even quieter.
I didn't point at the frosting. I didn't say clean hands or handprint or height. I knew if I started listing it, she'd hear it as me calling her a liar, and we'd lose any chance of keeping this calm.
"I just want to be sure before we make her say something she doesn't mean," I said.
Brook stared at the cake, at the blue smear, then at Emma's yellow dress. For a half second her eyes flicked down the way mine had. Then she shook her head.
"She's five. Apologies don't have to be perfect. They just have to happen so we can move on."
May you like
Emma's fingers tightened around mine. I felt the sweat again, and the small tremor in her grip.
I didn't move away from the table. I didn't wipe anything clean. I just stood there with my daughter pressed against my leg and the ruined cake sweating in the sun between us and Brook.
