Twenty years collapsed into one moment.
“Dad?”
Sophie hugged me.
“You okay?”
“Fine.”
Brooke snorted.
“He’s absolutely not fine.”
Lily wrapped her arms around both of us.
Soon all four of us were standing there crying like idiots.
College passed faster than childhood somehow.
Then came graduation.
Twenty-two years after the night Eric left those carriers at my door, I sat alone in my truck outside Halston State University.
I was forty-nine.
There was gray in my beard.
My left shoulder hurt whenever it rained.
The auto shop had closed two years earlier, and I now managed the parts department at a dealership.
I still lived in the same apartment, though I had finally replaced the couch.
Inside my jacket pocket was Eric’s original letter.
I had kept it all those years.
I don’t know why.
Maybe because some wounds become evidence.
Maybe because I needed proof that I had not imagined how abruptly my life changed.
