By 7:30 Thursday morning, eleven pieces of my life had been cut off my backpack, and the man sleeping in my bed knew exactly who had taken them.
Chapter 2
I called in sick to work that morning, something I’d done only twice in seven years. Then I sat at my kitchen table with the backpack in front of me and wrote down everything that was missing. Four patches were from Dad, three were souvenirs from my semester abroad, one came from a Broadway tour I’d seen with my mother, and the rest marked smaller memories that suddenly didn’t feel small at all.
By noon, anger had burned through the first layer of shock.
I messaged Claire and Ben, the two mutual friends who had been in my apartment before I went to bed. Neither had been there when Evan’s college buddies arrived, but Claire knew Tyler and gave me his last name. From there I found three of the men on social media.
One answered almost immediately.
His name was Jordan.
His message began, “I am so sorry.”
He had taken two patches.
He explained that Evan had told everyone I collected them, had dozens more, and wouldn’t care. Jordan admitted he should have known better, particularly when someone had to pull out a pocketknife to remove them.
He drove to my apartment that evening.
When I opened the door, he stood in the hallway with a plastic sandwich bag in his hand. Inside were two patches.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “It felt weird when he offered. I should’ve listened to that feeling.”
One of the patches was from an art museum in Vienna. The other was a little embroidered cardinal my grandmother had given me years before.
I held them against my chest.
“Thank you for bringing them back.”
Jordan looked at the damaged backpack on the table behind me. “For what it’s worth, Evan made it sound like you did this all the time. Like you gave patches away to people.”
“I do give patches as gifts,” I said. “New ones. Ones I buy for people. I don’t cut memories off my own bag.”
“Yeah.” His face reddened. “When you say it that way, I feel even stupider.”
After he left, I texted Evan.
Jordan returned two. I need the others back, especially Dad’s four.
His answer came forty minutes later.
I told you I’ll reach out this weekend.
No apology.
No question about how I was doing.
No offer to pay for repairing the holes.
Just irritation that I was still upset.
I called my sister, Rebecca.
She listened quietly until I finished.
Then she said, “You’re breaking up with him, right?”
Relief rushed through me so powerfully that I nearly cried.
“Two friends told me that would be an overreaction.”
“Over a backpack? Maybe. Over a man giving away your belongings and refusing to fix it? No.”
“That’s what I keep thinking.”
“Then stop asking people to give you permission to believe what you already know.”
That sentence stayed with me.
The following afternoon, Ben called. He had reached another man from the group, Chris, who admitted taking two patches and promised to return them. One of those was Dad’s.
Seven remained.
I spent Friday night searching names, profiles, old college photographs, anything that might connect me to the other men. I felt ridiculous at times, a grown woman hunting people online over scraps of embroidered cloth. Then I would look at the empty place where Dad’s 1994 patch had been, and the embarrassment vanished.
On Saturday, Evan finally called.
“I talked to a few people,” he said.
“A few?”
“Maggie, I’m trying.”
“No, I’m trying. You’re responding because I won’t stop asking.”
He exhaled. “Why are you making this into some huge relationship test?”
“Because it is one.”
“It was a mistake.”
“A mistake is spilling coffee on my bag. You gave pieces of it away.”
“I thought you’d be okay with it.”
“And after you found out I wasn’t?”
Silence.
I waited.
That was the real question, and both of us knew it.
People make foolish decisions. Good people sometimes hurt the people they love. But what happens after the hurt tells you more than the original mistake ever could.
Evan finally said, “I just think your reaction has been kind of extreme.”
I closed my eyes.
There it was.
Not I’m sorry.
Not I was wrong.
Not I’ll make this right.
He wanted the consequences to become smaller without doing anything to deserve forgiveness.
“I don’t want to see you anymore,” I said.
He went silent.
Then he laughed once, sharply. “You’re dumping me over patches?”
“No. I’m ending this because you believe you’re entitled to decide what matters to me.”
“That’s insane.”
“Maybe. But I’m still ending it.”
He accused me of humiliating him, exaggerating the story, turning friends against him, and throwing away six good months over one bad night. I listened until he ran out of arguments.
Then I said, “If telling people exactly what you did makes you look bad, the problem isn’t that I told them.”
I hung up.
For the first time since Thursday morning, my hands stopped shaking.
