“If I wasn’t here, you’d what?”

She shakes her head. “Nothing.” She tries to give me a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry about me, Lexie. I’ll be fine. I won’t be happy—I can’t be—but I’ll be fine.”

I watch in silence as she continues unpacking the box, helping her find where an item belongs if she doesn’t remember. Then there’s only one thing left to deal with: the collage frame that Ty filled up in the days before he died, the one with the pictures of his friends and family.

That doesn’t have a place where it belongs. After the funeral somebody stuck it behind his bedroom door, and it’s been there ever since.

Mom lays it on the bed and looks at it.

“I don’t know what to do with this. I could take the photos out and send them to the people in them, but I can’t remember their names. Isn’t that silly? I honestly don’t know who most of these people are.” She points to a picture on one edge. “I remember Damian and Patrick. The three amigos, I used to call them. And I remember the boys he played with when he was in elementary school. But his friends now . . . I was in nursing school by then. I didn’t pay as close attention as I should have. I don’t know them. What kind of mother am I, that I didn’t know his friends?”

“It’s okay, Mom.”

She shakes her head. We stand for a few minutes looking at the pictures. One depicts Mom giving Ty a bath when he was just a baby, which seems odd, that he would want people to see that picture, but Mom is so beautiful in it. She’s wearing curlers and a plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled up, one hand cupping Ty’s round baby head, the other dragging a washcloth over him. She’s looking up into the camera with half a smile, chagrined to be caught so undone, and she looks incredibly young and vibrant and, at the same time, maternal and sweet. She looks like a different person from the woman standing beside me now.

In another corner I spot the picture Mom took of Ty and me the night of homecoming, me in my green dress, Ty in his tux and his flawlessly makeup-covered forehead. He wanted people to see that, too. Us together. His arm around me. That’s something. It’s not an explanation or a goodbye, but it’s something.

And suddenly it hits me: the missing photographs. This is where Ty must have put the missing photographs.

I scan the collage again, but there’s no picture of Ty and Dad hunting. No picture of Dad at graduation. No picture of Dad here at all.

Like she can read my mind, Mom points to an empty slot in the collage, the only empty slot, which makes it seem deliberately empty. I noticed it at the funeral, but didn’t give it too much thought. Now, though, Mom is looking at it with a sorrowful expression.

“Your dad should have gone here,” she murmurs. “That was cruel of Tyler, leaving him out.”

Cruel is not a word that I would ever use to describe Ty.

“Dad probably didn’t even notice,” I say.

“He noticed.” Mom touches her finger to the glass. “I watched him that day, keeping in the back of the church, out of our way, because he wanted to stay by . . .” Her lips tighten. “But near the end, when the crowd was thinning, he came up and looked at this. He went from picture to picture, looking. And he never found himself there.”

“Maybe Dad doesn’t deserve to be there,” I argue.

She sighs. “Maybe not. But you should have seen his face when he realized he wasn’t included. He looked about as hurt as I’ve ever seen him. Then he just put his hands in his pockets and walked away. It was cruel. I didn’t think Tyler had that kind of vindictiveness in him.”

“Ty was angry,” I said. “He had every right to—”

Mom lifts her hand to stop me. “I know. I just wish he hadn’t ended things that way.”

I chew on my bottom lip, thinking. I look at the collage again, and then I suddenly notice that right in the middle, in a place of prominence, even, there’s a picture of Ashley Davenport. Not the homecoming picture of Ty and Ashley, but a black-and-white candid shot, taken by someone who was obviously trying to be artsy with the camera. It shows Ashley and two other cheerleaders in what must have been the seconds right after the basketball team made a basket, wearing their uniforms, smiling and jumping for the crowd in the background, their eyes bright, so full of action even in the picture that I can almost hear their shouts.

Mom sees what I’m looking at. “They’re so pretty, aren’t they?” she says. “Teenage girls are at the height of pretty, like flowers just as they bloom.”

I cock my head at her. “Me too? Am I a flower?”

She gives me an attempt at a smile. “You’re a flower.”

“Did you know this girl?” I ask, tapping the glass over the cheerleader photo.

“She was Tyler’s girlfriend,” Mom says. “Ashley. He brought her over to the house for dinner once.”

My mouth falls open. “He did? Where was I?”

“A Math Club competition, if memory serves.” She sighs, remembering. “We had pot roast I made in the slow cooker. She actually brought an apple pie that she baked herself. She was lovely, inside and out, that girl. You could see it in her. A good girl. Sweet. Just the right kind of girl for Tyler to be with.”

She looks away.

“Do you know why they broke up?” I ask softly.

She shakes her head. “He didn’t tell me.”