Cole’s gifts are always meaningful, I thought as I played with the gold cross at my neck, his mother’s pendant. He’d given it to me at a time when he wasn’t yet strong enough to let me into the hole left behind from losing a mother he never got to know. The pendant was his way of saying: here’s something of her until I’m able to share the rest. At the closet, I dug in my coat pocket until my fingers banged against the box, withdrawing it and admiring the silver wrapping and red ribbon tied into a bow. I ripped the metallic paper away before I could talk myself out of it, and inside the
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