“Fine, then,” I muttered. “We’ll start over.” I was struggling with our bindings, trying to create enough slack to reach the blade, when Arie’s lips curved up.

“Don’t laugh,” I told him.

“I’m not.”

“You’re smiling.”

“It’s funny.”

Frustration boosted by embarrassment, I’d have jumped to my feet right then and pointed him to the door if not for the snarled strings. “You’re a lunkhead.”

“Yeah? And you’re a mule.”

“Nincompoop.”

“Bad magician.”

I scrambled to one-up him before registering the jab. At his widening grin, punctuated by a lone dimple, I couldn’t ward off my own smile and swiftly devolved into giggles.

Arie shushed me despite the glint in his eyes. Then we returned to the trick—as usual, finding a solution together while keeping the darkness at bay.

***

Three Saturdays later, Papa and I spent the whole day on tasks and errands—his suggestion. My heightened dependency had receded long before, yet the outing sounded nice. We went to the bakery for a day-old loaf, to the company store for coal and other essentials, then to the cobbler shop to tackle his latest side job. When asked, I cheerily supplied the appropriate tools as he replaced rotting floorboards in the owner’s apartment above the store. Papa was handy that way.

Once we finished, I wasn’t surprised his service was paid for in trade; what I never expected was to be the sole beneficiary.

All the shoes I ever owned had come faded and patched, and my one pair at the time required shoving my feet in to make them fit and a cardboard liner to cover a hole.

“Schatje,” Papa said to me, “for your birthday. You liking these, they are yours.” He nodded to the silver-haired cobbler, who pridefully presented a pair of black boots.

Just the previous Wednesday, Papa had gifted me with a brand-new drawing pad for Christmas, ideal for sketching tricks. Plus, three weeks before that, in the Dutch tradition of the Sinterklaas holiday, I’d found in my shoe a milk-chocolate bar, which I was still savoring in nibbles. I hadn’t anticipated a thing for my birthday, still two days away, and definitely nothing like these, with pristine and polished leather, the laces absent a single fray.

They were beautiful.

And perfect.

And nobody’s but mine.

I squealed and threw my arms around Papa, nearly knocking him over. He laughed with a heartiness I’d never heard, a reaction so foreign to his body that he rattled like a rusty engine sputtering back to life. To me, of course, the sound was the loveliest in the world. Woefully, it stopped too soon, snuffed out by one of his coughing fits. Standard fair for underground dredgers.