The Millionaire's Intriguing Offer

Memories

"What's in it?" Bailey wasn't sure she could take any more surprises.

"The things you left in Sag Harbor."

"I don't understand." Bailey stared at the box and then looked back at Jack. "You already dropped off Mitsy's suitcase and I got the things that I'd left in Sag Harbor."

"No," Jack said, "the things you left the first time."

She felt a huge lump in her throat. She'd left her entire life in Sag Harbor when her grandfather died. Everything except the few items - mostly clothes - she'd been able to stuff into a bag when the social workers took her away, promising someone would bring her back to get other things later. But no-one ever had.

When she'd finally gotten a case worker to listen to her months later, the woman had told her she was sorry, but all the personal items in the house had been packed up and either donated or thrown away. Since her father was in jail and her mother couldn't be located, there'd been no one to turn those items over to. Bailey had screamed silently in her head, what about me?

There had been a small bank account, apparently, and if her mother was never located then those funds would probably go to Bailey when she turned eighteen. The case worker wasn't sure.

"Look," Jack said, "I don't even remember what all's in there. I was 15 when I packed it up, and it might not even be stuff you'd care about now. When I found out my parents had hired someone just to remove all the contents from the caretaker's house, I went in there first. I saved the stuff I thought you'd want then. When you were 13. I really thought I'd see you again soon, or at least there'd be a way to get it to you."

"And you kept it all these years? Why?"

"I had the box in my closet for awhile, then eventually - after the lawyer told me there was no way to find you - I put it up in the attic, just in case. It's been there ever since. Until I went up and got it last weekend."

He paused. "I only actually remembered it when Bridget told me how she'd saved all your letters in an envelop and that they were probably still there, on a shelf in her closet. So I checked and it was still there, in the attic, right where I left it."

Bailey's hands shook a little as she loosened the tape on the box and opened it.

Then she started to cry.

There were photos. Not many, but a few. A framed photo of herself and her grandfather standing outside the cottage, his arm around her shoulder, both of them squinting into the sun. It had sat on the shelf by the TV.

There were some loose photos, too, and she smiled as she recognized two of herself and Jack, one on his little sailboat, another of the two of them sitting on the dock smiling up at the camera. A photo of her mother as a teenager, before drugs and alcohol had taken over her life.

Her grandfather's pipe was there, and a roll of peppermint Lifesavers.

"Not sure I'd eat those," Jack said. "I didn't realize this box wouldn't be opened until more than a decade later."

But Bailey just closed her eyes and could see her grandfather sitting beside her on the steps to the little porch, smoking his pipe, and reaching into his pocket to pull out the ever-present roll of candy and offer one to her. They'd had a lot of important conversations over pipe smoke and peppermint Lifesavers, and the two scents were inextricably combined in her memories. Conversations about her mother going back into rehab. Her father failing, again, to hold down a job and stay out of jail. The time he told her, painfully, that he wasn't going to send any more money to her mother because it wasn't helping. That maybe if he stopped, then she'd finally stop doing drugs and get her life together.