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 3
Getting rid of Evan was easier than getting back the remaining patches.
Two men returned theirs without an argument. One mailed a patch to me with a handwritten apology tucked into the envelope. Another met Ben at a coffee shop and admitted he’d been drunk and stupid and had never once considered that Evan might not have the right to give away something from someone else’s home.
The last two men avoided me.
One was Tyler.
He had Dad’s 1994 patch.
I knew because Jordan remembered watching him cut it from the upper pocket.
After three unanswered messages, I asked Rebecca to come with me.
“You’re not going alone,” she said.
“I wasn’t planning to.”
We drove to Tyler’s townhouse on a gray Sunday afternoon. I had rehearsed a dozen speeches in the car, each one angry, eloquent, devastating.
When Tyler opened the door, I forgot all of them.
He was younger than I’d imagined, maybe twenty-eight, wearing sweatpants and an Ohio State sweatshirt. The moment he saw me, recognition crossed his face.
“Oh,” he said.
“My name is Maggie Sullivan.”
“I know.”
“You have something of mine.”
He leaned one shoulder against the doorframe. “Evan said you were cool with us taking those.”
“I’m not here to argue about Evan.”
“I mean, I don’t even know where it is.”
I looked him in the eye.
“My father gave me that patch when I was fourteen. He died last year.”
Everything about Tyler changed.
His shoulder came away from the doorframe. His eyes dropped.
“I didn’t know that.”
“I believe you. Now you do.”
Rebecca said nothing beside me.
Tyler swallowed. “Come in.”
Ten minutes later, he returned from upstairs holding the patch between two fingers.
I recognized it instantly.
A faded blue background. A white airplane. A fraying red border Dad had repaired once with clumsy stitches while sitting at our kitchen table.
I took it without speaking.
“I’m really sorry,” Tyler said. “Seriously.”
I believed him, too.
Within two weeks, I had every patch back. A few were damaged around the edges, and the backpack itself looked wounded where they had been cut away, but nothing was missing anymore. Some people apologized sincerely, some reluctantly, and almost every one of them offered the same defense.
Evan told us it was okay.
Eventually, I began answering, “He lied.”
I told our mutual friends what had happened, including the ones who’d urged me to forgive him. A few apologized for dismissing me. Others insisted that while Evan had been wrong, I had made the situation “too public.”
Those friendships never fully recovered.
At first, that hurt.
Later, I understood why.
For most of my life, I’d been the person who made uncomfortable things easier for everyone else. I swallowed irritation, changed subjects, accepted halfhearted apologies, and worried about whether expressing pain would make other people feel guilty.
Dad used to tease me about it.
“You’d apologize to a burglar for making him climb through the window,” he’d once said.
I could still hear him laughing.
The strange thing was that grief had made me even more passive. After Dad died, I had become afraid of losing anyone else, so I tolerated small disappointments that I might once have questioned. Evan’s easygoing personality had seemed safe because he never demanded much from me.
Months later, I finally realized the truth.
Evan wasn’t laid-back.
He simply didn’t care very deeply about anything that inconvenienced him.
There is a difference.
A laid-back person can still protect what matters to you. A calm person can still recognize when they’ve caused harm. A decent person can say, “I was wrong,” and then put energy into repairing what they damaged.
Evan never did.
He contacted me twice after the breakup. Both times, he said some version of the same thing: he couldn’t believe I was still angry.
He never said he couldn’t believe he had hurt me.
Once I noticed the difference, I couldn’t unsee it.
I took the repaired patches to a tailor, who reinforced the places where the fabric had been cut. The backpack was usable again, but I stopped carrying it every day. I told myself it was because the repairs made it stiff.
The truth was harder to admit.
For the first time, looking at it hurt.
Not because of Evan.
Because Dad was gone.
I had spent so much energy fighting to recover the things he’d given me that I hadn’t noticed how desperately I was trying to recover him.
No amount of thread could do that.
So I placed the backpack carefully on the top shelf of my closet and let it rest.
