That was everything.

Chapter 26 — The Envelope

It was two months later, on the night of Auggie’s seventh birthday — yogurt cups, dinosaur balloons, a boy asleep at last in a room full of streamers — that my father handed me an old envelope.

“I kept this,” he said.

“Through everything.

It was the one thing I would not let them take, and God knows they tried.” His hands shook as he gave it to me.