She wasn’t looking at what she’d dropped. She was staring past me, straight at my husband. Not at him, exactly. At one specific spot on his arm.
The crooked sunflower.
“Bradley?”
His hand froze in midair, fingers still curled around the sweater he’d been reaching for. Slowly — too slowly — he lowered it.
“I’m sorry,” he said, in a voice I didn’t recognize. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.”
The woman took a step closer instead of backing away. “No, I haven’t.”
Brad turned toward me with a brightness that didn’t reach his eyes. “Hailey, let’s get Molly some pants.”
“Bradley.” The stranger’s voice cracked on the second syllable of his own name. She lifted a hand and pointed, and I watched her finger tremble in the air. “You kept it.”
He went completely still.
I looked between the two of them, my pulse picking up for reasons I couldn’t yet name. “Kept what?”
“My sunflower,” she said, and something in the way she said my landed in my chest like a stone dropped into still water.
All the color drained out of Brad’s face. “Erin… stop…”
So he knew her name. Knew it well enough to say it like a plea.
The woman — Erin — pressed a trembling hand to her mouth. “I never thought I’d see it again.”
“Erin, please.” His voice had dropped to something barely above a whisper.
That was when she seemed to notice, for the first time, that he wasn’t alone. Her eyes moved from Brad to me, then down to Molly clutching a fistful of his now-useless button-down.
“Your family?” she asked.
Brad nodded once, like the word cost him something.
Erin’s eyes widened. “You never told them?”
“There wasn’t anything to tell,” he said quickly.
She let out a short, disbelieving laugh that had no humor in it at all. “Nothing?”
