I didn’t even remember putting it in that box.
“I wasn’t supposed to open it… but I did,” Ainsley said quietly. “I found it when I was looking for the Halloween decorations in November. I wasn’t snooping. It was just sitting there.”
“You read it?”
“I read everything in the box, Dad. The letter. The notebook. All of it.”
The notebook…
That’s what hit me the hardest.
I had completely forgotten about it.
It was just a cheap spiral notebook I kept when I was 17—filled with plans, sketches, and half-formed ideas. The kind of dreams you write down when you still believe anything is possible.
