I want to be careful how I tell this, because I know how it sounds — the convenient box, the tidy resolution — and it was not that.

There was no letter in it explaining everything, no deathbed confession that made the nine years disappear.

What was in the box was smaller and truer than that.

It was both of our childhoods, kept in exactly equal measure.

Terry’s pinewood derby car’s missing wheel, wrapped in a tissue.

My first-place ribbon from the fourth-grade science fair.

His baby shoes and mine, side by side.

A lock of dark hair in an envelope marked Janet, age 2 and another marked Terry, age 1. Report cards, both of ours, the good and the bad.