“I know.”

“And then you told me she hated me.”

“I thought it would blow over.”

“How?”

“I thought eventually I’d fix it.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No.”

“Instead, every year you sent her letters back.”

David said nothing.

“And you sent my gifts back too, didn’t you?”

His silence answered.

I sat down on the rug beside the box.

Thirteen years.

Thirteen birthdays.

Thirteen years of believing I had failed a girl I loved.

“Why now?” I asked.

David finally looked at me.

“Chloe called me last week.”

“Why?”

He hesitated.

Then he explained.

A few weeks earlier, I had run into our neighbor Margaret at the grocery store.

She had asked about Chloe.

Without thinking, I called her “my girl.”

Margaret’s daughter Maya happened to be friends with Chloe.

Somehow the comment reached her.

And Maya told Chloe something else.

That for years, I had continued asking about her.

That I had never hated her.

That I had missed her.

Chloe realized something was wrong.

She called David.

And eventually, she sent the box.

I looked down at the stack of cards in my lap.

Birthdays we had never shared.

Conversations that had never happened.

Years neither of us could get back.

Then I stood.

“Give me Chloe’s phone number.”

David hesitated.

“Alice, maybe we should—”

“The real one.”

He stopped.

“Not the number you told me had been disconnected.”

He knew there was nothing left to hide.

He pulled out his phone.

Scrolled.

Then read the number aloud.