He had moved to Indianapolis after that, without telling her goodbye. She was busy making the movie Unlocked with Brandon Paul, and Cody began putting as much distance between them as possible. He wouldn’t put her in danger. Period. And if that’s what his mother’s life — his life — had come to … a dangerous situation for Bailey … then his time with Bailey was over.
And now there was Cheyenne to complicate matters.
Cody breathed in deep and lifted a stack of pages off the top. He unfolded the first one and immediately understood what it was. Copies of diary pages from Bailey’s journal. He felt a catch in his heart, and he folded the papers again. Later … he would read them later. When he wasn’t on his way back to the hospital … when his heart could take missing her.
Next in the box were a few paperback books he’d been missing, and three issues of Sports Illustrated he’d set aside back when he lived with the Flanigans. He laid them on the bed and pulled a stuffed Tigger from the box. A smile tugged at his lips. It seemed like yesterday, he and Bailey at the county fair … competing against each other in the squirt gun contest, seeing who could pop the balloon first. When they tied, he gave her a Winnie the Pooh, and she gave him a Tigger. He’d always wondered what had happened to the little guy.
Next in the box was a broken pair of sunglasses — just the left half. The ache in his chest deepened. He had broken them on the Fourth of July … hours before their private walk around the lake and the conversation that had led to what felt like a dating relationship. On one of the happiest days of his life he had stepped on his sunglasses and broken them in half. For the next half hour, he and Bailey each wore one half, laughing all the while. “So that we’ll always see eye to eye,” he’d told her.
The thing that stuck out to him now wasn’t that she had included this half pair of sunglasses in the box of his things. But that she’d kept the other half. She still kept it.
He closed his eyes and longed for one more conversation with her, one more chance to tell her how much she’d meant to him over the years, and to assure her that he would never love anyone the way he had loved her. But that wouldn’t have been fair — not now, in light of how life had changed for both of them.
Finally he reached the bottom of the box and there … there after so many years of missing it … was the one item he’d spent hours looking for. The friendship ring Bailey had given him when she was still in high school. The verse engraved across the front read, Philippians 4:13 — I can do all things through Christ who gives me strength. Bailey had dismissed the importance of the ring when she’d given it to him. Maybe because she was young, and he was already out of high school — as if she didn’t want him to think she meant anything romantic by the gesture.
But even so he could hear her, feel her hand on his arm as she gave him the ring. “I’ve never had a friend like you, Cody.” She assured him that he didn’t have to wear it, but he wouldn’t consider such a possibility. The ring meant more to him than Bailey ever could’ve known, and he had worn it until one summer day when he took it off to do yard work with Bailey’s father and brothers. Somehow, it had gotten moved and he hadn’t seen it again. Until now.
He turned the ring over in his fingers and wished once more that the girl who had given it to him might still be here, assuring him one more time that she had never had a friend like him. Cody looked at the ring for a long while, and then he did the only thing he could do. He slipped it on the forefinger of his right hand. He might not have a friendship with Bailey or the chance to see her again. But he could keep the ring. He needed the message now more than ever. He could do all things through Christ … even letting go of Bailey Flanigan … and being there for Cheyenne.