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When I can finally look up, he says, “She’s in Portland. She made it, but that wasn’t her first stop in case that mean boy tried to track her down. She’s a pediatric nurse at the children’s hospital. She married a good man, a schoolteacher. They have two little girls.”

He swallows hard. “The oldest one is named Lindsey.”

I turn into Travis again.

“Her number’s in the last card,” Hank says. “The newest one. She said you could call. Whenever you’re ready. She said she understands if you’re angry.”

“I’m not angry at her,” I say into Travis’s chest. “I was never angry at her. I was so scared, Hank. All this time.”

“I know, Lindsey. Me too.” He puts his hat on. At the door he stops, the way he does, and turns back. “June would have liked him,” he says, nodding at Travis. “She always said you’d end up with somebody who could sit still.”

The bell rings behind him.

I sit on my stool with the shoebox in my lap and the oldest card against my chest and Travis’s arms around me.

“Seventeen cards,” I whisper. “She named her baby Lindsey.”

“I heard.”

I look up at him. He’s blurry. Everything’s blurry.

“Will you read them with me?” I ask. “I don’t think I can do it alone.”

He locks my front door and flips the sign to CLOSED. Then he picks up the shoebox, takes my hand and walks me back through the workroom.

He sits down on the cold concrete floor with his back against the carnations, and I sit down between his knees with my back against his chest, and we open them in order.

I’m working nights at a hospital cafeteria and taking classes. Do you still hate math? I still hate math.

I can legally drink now and I don’t even like it. I had a strawberry daiquiri and thought of you.

Twenty-four. I passed my boards. I’m a nurse, Linds. Me. The girl who fainted when you got your ears pierced.

Travis laughs against my hair at that one.

“She fainted?”

“Face-first into a rack of earrings at Claire’s,” I say, wiping my eyes. “Right in the mall in Ogden. They had to call security.”

Twenty-seven. I met somebody. His name is Ben. He teaches fourth grade. He sings in the car, badly, like you. I think that’s why I said yes.

Thirty. We had a baby girl. I named her after the bravest person I know.

I have to stop after that one. I put my face in my hands. Travis takes the card out of my fingers so I won’t crush it and sets it carefully back in the box, in order, and waits.

“Keep going?” he asks, after a while.

“Keep going.”

Every card is signed the same. BE FRI and a lopsided heart. Every one of them is a different drugstore cartoon. A dog in a party hat. A cupcake with sunglasses. A cat on a skateboard. Every year, in time for December second, a girl in Portland walked into a Walgreens and picked out a dumb card for me and mailed it to a deputy in Huntsville, Utah, knowing he might never hand it over.

The last one came last December, and instead of a drugstore card it’s a watercolor of a sunflower, painted by somebody who very clearly cannot paint.

My oldest painted this for you. She says it’s a sunflower. I told her you’d know.

Under that is a phone number with a 503 area code. And a return address on the back of the envelope. A street in Portland. A real street, with a real house number, where Danielle Hayes lives with a schoolteacher named Ben and two little girls, one of whom is named after me.

I take out my phone and type in the number.