Because I wasn’t looking at the object anymore.
I was looking at the memory attached to it.
Seventeen years earlier.
A hospital room.
A frightened nineteen-year-old boy sitting beside a hospital bed.
A newborn baby wrapped in a white blanket.
And a promise made before anyone knew how difficult keeping it would become.
I looked at Ethan.
“You found it.”
He nodded.
“Where?”
His eyes dropped toward the dress.
“In the attic.”
I stared at him.
“The attic?”
“Behind the old wooden trunk.”
I remembered that trunk.
I hadn’t opened it in years.
Not since the funeral.
Not since I had packed away the clothes, photographs, letters, and little pieces of a life I couldn’t bear to look at.
“Ethan, you weren’t supposed to go through those things.”
“I know.”
“Why?”
He swallowed.
“Because I was looking for something.”
“What?”
He looked at the object in my hand.
“This.”
I closed my fingers around it.
My tears finally came.
All those years.
