first, even though I know it’s there.
I toss the bag back into the backseat and dump the contents of the envelope onto my lap.
“Whoa,” Jesse says. “What is all of this?”
“Just stuff of yours, ours,” I say. “That I kept.”
Jesse looks touched. “Wow,” he says.
“I never forgot about you,” I say. “I could never forget about you.”
He looks at me briefly and then down at my lap, to the photos and papers I’ve saved.
He doesn’t acknowledge what I’ve said. Instead, he grabs a picture from the pile. “Is this from New Year’s Eve in Amsterdam?” he asks me.
I nod my head.
That night, we kissed other people at midnight because we were in a fight. At 12:07 a.m., we made up in the bathroom of a dingy bar in De Wallen and made out sitting on top of the sink. The photo is a selfie from the wee hours of the morning, when he and I were sitting out on a bench by the river.
Jesse picks up a candid photo of us on top of a mountain in Costa Rica and a picture of him on a beach in Sydney. You can tell I am the one taking the picture. You can tell, just from the smile on his face, how much he loves me.
“God, look at us,” he says.
“I know,” I say.
“Do you remember when this photo was taken?” Jesse says, showing me the one of him on the beach.
“Of course I do,” I say.
“That was the day we decided we were never going to make a backup plan, so that we had to pursue our dreams,” he says. “Remember? We were going to take jobs that allowed us to see the world.”
“I remember.”
I riffle through a few more pictures until I find another envelope inside. It’s addressed to him in my handwriting. It is the letter I wrote him before I went out on my date with Sam. I push it aside, allowing it to make its way, without being noticed, back into the larger envelope it came from.
And then I find the photo I’m looking for. Our prom. Me with my butterflies.
“All right,” I say. “Look at this picture and tell me the truth.”
We are standing in front of a large glass window, overlooking Boston. You can see city lights in the background. Jesse is in a cheap tux with a wayward boutonniere that I pinned on him in my front yard as all of our parents watched. I’m right beside him, turned slightly to the side but looking at the camera. I am standing in a bright red dress, with way too many clips in my hair and a series of already-faded and splotchy fake butterfly tattoos down my back.
A victim of early-2000s fashion.
Jesse immediately starts laughing.
“Oh, my God,” he says. “You look like you have some sort of skin condition.”
I start laughing. “Nope, just fake butterflies.”
“I remember thinking that those butterflies were the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.”
“Oh, I remember thinking I was the coolest girl at the prom,” I say. “Just goes to show things aren’t always the way we remember them.”
Jesse looks up at me, trying to see if I meant anything by that. I decide to ignore how much it resonates.
“But you,” I say. “You nailed it. Handsome then. Handsome now.”
Jesse smiles and then turns back toward the steering wheel, getting ready to get on the road.
I gather the rest of the contents of the envelope and try to put them all back. But, of course, some fall to the floor and others get caught on the edge, unwilling to be crammed in.
I pick up what’s fallen, including my ruby ring, put it all back in the envelope, and then throw it in the backseat. Only then do I see that I’ve left something on the center console between us.
It’s an almost four-year-old article from the Beacon.
“Local Man Jesse Lerner Missing.”
Next to the headline is an old photo of him standing in his parents’ yard, waving, his right hand perfectly intact.
I was still in LA when the article was published, but a copy of it made its way to me shortly after I got back to Massachusetts. I almost threw it away. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of anything with his picture on it, anything that bore his name. I had so little of him left.
I grab it and fold it back in two, the way it has lived in the envelope for years.
Jesse watches my hands as