Page 73

“You’re worried,” she says, and her voice is gentle.

“I’m careful.”

“You’re worried, and you called me in the middle of your shift to tell me where to drive.” There’s a smile in her words. “Travis Raines. That might be the most romantic thing anybody’s ever done for me.”

“It’s an evacuation plan.”

“Romantic,” she says, and hangs up on me before I can argue.

I stand behind the station with the phone in my hand and the wind in my face, and I can’t stop grinning.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Hank Simmons walks into my shop five minutes before close, with a shoebox under his arm. It’s been nineteen days since he mailed his letter.

I’m behind the counter, wrapping a mixed bouquet for an anniversary.

It’s an old Red Wing boot box, the cardboard soft and worn at the corners. He keeps his hand flat on top of it.

“She wrote back,” he says.

My hand stops, a chill running up my sleeve.

“She wrote back,” Hank says again, and takes a folded letter out of his shirt pocket. He doesn’t give it to me. He unfolds it with his big old hands and reads one line out loud, very slowly, like he wants to get it exactly right.

“‘Tell her everything, Hank. Give her the cards. Tell her I’m sorry. Tell her I never stopped.’ ”

He folds the letter back up. He puts it back in his pocket. Then he takes his hand off the shoebox and pushes it toward me across the counter.

“She sent me one every year,” he says. “For your birthday. December second. Every year, a card for you, inside a letter for me. She said I was never to give them to you unless it was safe. It’s been safe since 2015, Lindsey. Eleven years that boy was in the ground, and I never knew it. I kept writing her I couldn’t be sure. I kept putting your cards in my desk drawer.”

He looks down at the box. “I’m ashamed of the drawer. But that’s not what keeps me up. It’s the eleven years.”

The box is full of envelopes. Seventeen of them. All different colors, all different sizes. Every one of them has my name on the front in loopy, fast handwriting with circles over the i’s.

LINDS.

My knees give. I sit down hard on the stool behind my register. Oh my God.

The bell over the door rings behind Hank. Travis comes in wearing his station T-shirt.

He takes one look at me, and at the box, and at Hank. He crosses my shop in about three steps, comes around the counter and puts his hand on my back.

I can’t talk. I pick up the first envelope, the one on the bottom, the oldest. It’s pale yellow. The postmark is from December 2009. I open it with shaking fingers.

It’s a birthday card from a drugstore. A cartoon cat holding a balloon. Inside, in Danielle’s handwriting:

Happy 18th, Linds. I’m okay. I’m safe. I’m so sorry I didn’t say goodbye. I couldn’t. I hope you’re running the shop. I hope you’re singing. I miss you every single day.

At the bottom, signed the way we always signed everything, our two halves:

BE FRI—and a lopsided heart, because Danielle couldn’t draw.

Something tears loose in my chest. Travis’s arm comes around me, and I turn my face into his shirt and hold the card against my chest.

He holds me as I cry harder than I have since I was seventeen.

Hank stands on the other side of the counter. He waits.