“Dad asked me to put it there before you arrived.”
Douglas attempted a smile.
“I thought you’d recognize it.”
I took a step into the room.
“I don’t.”
“You will.”
His voice was weak, but the words carried the quiet certainty of someone who had rehearsed this moment for years.
I moved toward the chair. The box seemed almost too ordinary to hold the weight he had placed upon it.
“May I?”
Douglas nodded.
When I lifted the lid, I saw a folded letter, a small velvet jewelry case, and a stack of photographs bound together with a rubber band that had long since lost its elasticity.
My breath caught.
The jewelry case was blue.
I knew it before I touched it.
I had seen it once, forty-one years earlier, in the back seat of Douglas’s father’s car.
We had been sitting outside the train station. Douglas was leaving for college the next morning. He had promised to come by my house afterward, but instead he had shown up with a troubled expression and a cardboard box filled with books, clothes, and the uncertain future of a nineteen-year-old who believed every important decision had to be made immediately.
