“Gone where?”
“I thought he had taken it.”
I looked toward the room where Douglas lay.
“Did he?”
Lucas shook his head.
“He says he never saw it.”
The elevator doors began to close.
“Who else had access to the box?”
“Only me, Dad, and the attorney.”
The doors shut before I could ask anything more.
Outside, the night air was cool. I stood beneath the hospital entrance awning, holding the wooden box against my chest.
Inside it were a ring, thirty-seven letters, an old photograph, and a mystery that had survived longer than most marriages.
I had come to the hospital believing I was about to say goodbye to the boy I had loved.
Instead, I was leaving with the possibility that the goodbye had happened forty years ago—but not between us.
At home, I placed the box on my kitchen table and made tea I forgot to drink.
