This is a love story.

Tiny Addyson Faith Smith was born a week ago, on the 31st birthday of her father, Thomas “Trey” Smith.

She weighed 5 pounds, 11 ounces, has a good head of hair, 10 little fingers and 10 long toes and a couple of other notable features.

“She was born with two little birthmarks on her nose,” said her mother, Jennifer Smith. “We said they were her brothers’ angel kisses.”

Addyson’s brothers, Tyler Daniel Smith, who was 4, and Hayden Anderson Smith, just 22 months, died May 16, 2009, asleep in their beds when a fire swept through the Smiths’ Sherman Avenue home.

Despite the courageous efforts of Trey Smith, a volunteer fireman since the age of 16 who’d risen to the level of assistant chief of the Culkin Volunteer Fire Department, the boys could not be saved.

Trey Smith went on to receive a hero’s award from a national firefighters’ magazine — not for trying to get back into his burning home, but for doggedly going right back to work as a volunteer fireman.

Now Trey and Jennifer have gone right back to work as parents.

Just as Faith is Addyson’s middle name, it’s also the center that has held the family together through the deepest of tragedies.

“We had a lot of questions from people,” said Trey Smith. “We still do. People ask, ‘How do you do it?’ What I can’t understand is how people do it that don’t have Jesus. It’s easy for us to do it. We have peace that we will see them again. That’s where my peace will lie.”

Jennifer Smith said her nephew suggested their baby girl’s name. They liked the idea, and chose to spell it with a “y” because the boys’ names both included the letter.

“Trey said he wanted ‘Faith’ from the get-go,” Jennifer said.

The couple, who after the fire had given themselves about a year before trying to have another child, got the positive pregnancy results on May 30, Memorial Day, on their way to her mother’s house.

“Everybody was just so excited,” Jennifer Smith said.

Jennifer delivered Addyson at 39 weeks — one week early — after an otherwise easy pregnancy. An insurance coding specialist at The Street Clinic, Jennifer Smith worked almost to her delivery date.

Her doctor ordered a Caesarian section because Addyson’s heart rate kept dropping and her umbilical cord appeared to be wrapped around her neck. In addition, Jennifer had had complications during her pregnancy with one of the boys, landing her on bed-rest for more than 10 weeks.

Given what they’d been through, the couple would have been forgiven a little anxiety.

“Without our faith it would have been troubling,” said Trey Smith, “but we knew God was going to take care of it. What he saw fit to do was fine with us. He knows best.”

What does terrify Trey, he said, is that Addyson is a girl.

“I was rough with the boys,” he said with a laugh, “but I’m afraid I’ll break her.”

Scheduling the delivery on Trey’s birthday happened by chance, Jennifer said, but through another coincidence, Addyson made her appearance at 10:36 a.m., while Trey was born at 10:36 p.m.

“She looks just like her oldest brother when he was born,” said Jennifer Smith. Temperamentally, the baby is like her brothers were as infants, calm and serene.

The difference so far is that Addyson sometimes has to be woken up for meals.

“We didn’t have to wake the boys up,” Jennifer said. “They knew when it was time to eat. They knew before it was time to eat.”

Family and friends rallied around the couple after the fire, collecting enough money to buy a new mobile home and have it placed on the property, building front and back porches and placing engraved bricks in the memory of Tyler and Hayden.

They have been excited and overjoyed anticipating Addyson’s birth. Relatives visiting the hospital wore T-shirts that said “Addyson’s aunt” and “Addyson’s mamaw.”

The home is full of signs of a new baby — lots of flowers, balloons and laundry.

The couple’s two dogs, Tyson, a Yorkie, and Harley, a Lhasa Apso, acquired in the weeks after the boys — and their two dogs — died, race around the house, jumping on visitors and furniture unless Jennifer goes behind closed doors to nurse the baby. Then the dogs are prone before the door, whining to get in.

“You see things that remind you of them, that make you think of them,” Trey said about his sons. “The dogs remind me of the way the boys were. Tyson is always going a hundred miles an hour, just like Tyler. And Harley is just like Hayden.”

The couple want more children. “I’ll have as many as she wants,” Trey Smith said. “It doesn’t matter to me, I love children.”

On the wall next to their dining room table, Trey has mounted a large dried grapevine, woven into a cross, that held flowers at the boys’ funeral. Next to it he’s mounted these words: Faith is the strength by which a shattered world shall emerge into the light.

“You’ve got to have your priorities right,” said Trey. “God first, and then family. And that’s how it’s always been for us.”