Two days later, Asher waited for me in the underground parking garage. He stepped from behind a concrete pillar and blocked the path to my car.
He held a worn cardboard box against his chest.
“You don’t know the whole story, Serena.” His voice scraped. “You never did.”
He lifted the lid. Hundreds of colored paper cranes filled the box. Beneath them lay a stack of letters marked with uneven Braille dots.
“After the car accident, when I was blind, I wanted to give up,” he said.
“Chloe came every day. She read to me. She folded one crane for every day she prayed for my recovery. Those letters told me I still had a future.”
He held the box toward me. “I owed her my life. I hurt you because I thought I had to repay that debt. That was all it was.”
I opened my briefcase and removed a slim
