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“Ahoy matey! It’s my daughter’s twenty-second year on this earth. Give a big round of applause for the lovely little cabbage!” he shouts to a man on a paddleboard.

I roll my eyes, but it's impossible not to smile. This is so quintessentially my dad, taking something as simple as a pedal boat and turning it into an excursion.

“This is how I die,” Rafael mutters, sinking back into his seat. “On a plastic toy boat, in front of ducks, being yelled at in two languages.”

“There's cake at the end of this journey. Doesn't that make it worth it?” I ask, whispering so my dad won’t direct any more attention toward Rafa.

He gives me a look, the kind that says only because of you , and my heart does a little flip.

Even as I sit at this small rustic table tucked in the corner of a restaurant my dad took Maman on their twentieth wedding anniversary, I still find it hard to believe that we made it off of that pedal boat dry.

A waiter with two small lemon tarts and a chocolate mousse approaches the table, smiling as he sets the tarts in front of Dad and me and passes the mousse to Rafael.

“Thank you,” I say as Dad digs around in his “murse.” He’s now on some man-purse kick thanks to Rafael’s genius idea to take him shopping down the riviera after pedal boating.

He produces a cake topper that looks a lot like a closed-up flower.

“Wouldn’t be a birthday without a candle,” he says, and his smirk gives him away immediately.

He presses the plastic into the tart and grabs out a pack of matches.

“You know, the one positive thing that came out of that pandemic is that I don’t see as many people blowing out their candles on a communal dessert.

That’s just disgusting. I’m not sure why we ever did that.

It really shouldn’t have taken a global pandemic to help people realise that. ”

I chuckle, sucking in a breath, but before I can answer, he’s lit the match and pressed it to the top of the candle.

It starts to spin, opening slowly. Each petal has a candle leading to a sparkler in the centre.

Each candle becomes lit one by one, and finally, the sparkler starts throwing off tiny flecks of glittery flames as the stupid piece of plastic starts to sing.

Rafael leans in close to my ear. “Make a wish, mi vida ,” he whispers softly.

But I don’t need to.

I already got it.