“So, do you want your presents?” I asked, heading to the kitchen where I had them stashed in a cabinet. Nolan put her hands over her face and turned red in an instant. “Uh, or not…” I stopped in my tracks.

“No, no,” she said, shaking her head and frowning a bit. “I totally want them. I’m sorry. It’s just that I didn’t bring anything for you. I sort of haven’t been able to do much lately, I’ve been…busy.”

I watched her face carefully. I wasn’t sure how much she knew I knew, and I didn’t want tonight to turn into a self-help session, or an intervention. To put her at ease, I just smiled and bent down behind the kitchen counter to pull out her gifts. “Yeah, that’s pretty crappy of you to not get me anything,” I teased as I walked toward her, her face hardening with a toughness at my insult. “I guess you’ll just have to spend two nights with me now,” I winked, letting her know I was kidding. “Seriously, Noles, you don’t need to get me anything. This was just something I wanted to do.”

I slid the first box in front of her. It was one of my dad’s old boot boxes, the largest box with a lid we had in the house. I didn’t wrap it very well, opting to just tie a ribbon around it. She pulled the strings and looked at me with a smirk, clearly trying not to judge my very masculine wrapping job. “Hey, I was in a hurry,” I shrugged.

She smiled, and then looked down, pushing the lid to the side. I held my breath as she reached in and pulled out the first gray T-shirt. It was my Coolidge football shirt. She held it up to her face and breathed it in, and watching her close her eyes and just take in my scent, so damned adoring and in love, had me lost. “It was always your favorite,” I said softly. She just nodded and looked up, her eyes tearing. “There’s more,” I urged her on.

She pulled out a MicNic shirt next, just like the one she’d had for years. “Where’d you find this?” she held it up against her body, rubbing the softness of it and clutching it close.

“Ah, that one was hard. I had Sienna’s help. We went to three different thrift stores, and that one was actually in the last one, all the way up in Florence,” I said, acknowledging that I’d driven to the next town, 50 miles away, just to find a shirt.

As she took each shirt out of the box, she held it up and admired it for minutes, laying each one over the next against her, hugging them close. There were old movie shirts, concert T-shirts, Arizona tourist trap shirts—they weren’t all exact replicas, but they were damn close. Nolan was never about the expensive designer labels. Hell, the girl owned maybe two dresses, and a skirt, still as an adult. But these stupid T-shirts? They were wrapped up in her identity. And I knew when she lost them that she’d feel stripped. And I just couldn’t stand it.

“You like them?” I asked, reaching for the last one she’d pulled from the box and feeling it with my fingers, tracing the soft letters from some arcade that had shut down years ago.

She nodded without words, not ready to look me in the eyes. She wore her emotions, and I knew she was touched. But I didn’t want this to be about her appreciation for me. I wanted it to be about her feeling happy, relieved and less lost. So, I sat there quietly—and waited while she put each one back in the box, and then slid it to the corner of the sofa. She scooted over to me and reached around my neck, giving me a full-bodied hug, her head resting hard against my shoulder. I heard her small sniffles and just caressed her head. “I’m glad you like them,” I whispered in her ear, stroking her hair until she was ready to release me.

When she finally did, I slapped my hands in my lap and then asked if she was ready for the next one.

“You got me something else?” she said, her face turning guilty.

“Ah. No feeling bad, I told you, I don’t need anything,” I said, sliding over the second box. Nolan recognized it instantly, her eyes popping back up to mine.

“Oh my God!” she gasped, covering her mouth and grinning ear-to-ear. “You kept this? All this time?”

“You bet your ass I kept it. When a hot girl shows up at my door, and hands me a box of important things like this, I store it safely—even if she’s pissed as hell when she does it,” I said, recalling the time we’d broken up in high school. Nolan had showed up at my dad’s house with her box of mementoes, thrusting them at me angrily. I’d put the box in my attic when she did and had forgotten about it until the fire. I knew it wouldn’t replace a lot of the memories Nolan had saved in her room, but it was a good start. And they were all memories of us, and that’s what I wanted her to hold onto most.