Page 249 of Securing the Pucking Rebound

“Yeah,” she agrees. “I keep telling Mom to get rid of it all and turn it into a real guest room, but she won’t have it. I don’t think she’ll ever get over the empty nest syndrome.”

“It’s cute that she cares this much,” I muse as I look at each photograph from Sienna’s childhood and teen years.

There’s a small part of me that hopes I’ll find an old photo of myself hiding amongst them all, but I know it’s pointless. I’m the only one sad enough to cling to memories of that summer as hard as I did.

“You were a hot cheerleader,” I tell her when I find her in her uniform with her pompoms at her side. “Do you still have an outfit in here somewhere?”

“Come over here,” she says, and when I turn around, I find her sitting cross-legged on the bed with a scrapbook in front of her.

“What’s that? Tell me it’s a cheer scrapbook.”

“Come and look.”

I sit beside her and reach out to open it.

My breath catches when I read the handwritten title on the first page.

Summer Vacation at The Smythsons Ranch, Texas.

“Is this…”

“Keep going,” she encourages.

I do, and I quickly discover that this scrapbook isn’t really about her vacation that summer, but of the very beginning of our relationship.

I remember her having a digital camera hanging from her wrist the whole time. She was always snapping photos, but I never really thought about what she did with them once she got home. Well, apart from the one she printed and sent me that now sits in pride of place on my nightstand.

“Sienna,” I breathe as I flip through page after page.

“I told you I never forgot.”

“This is…this is incredible,” I say, flipping through all the pages, reliving those incredible two weeks.

When I glance up at her, I find that her cheeks are redder than ever.

“Are you embarrassed?”

She laughs that sweet sound I’m obsessed with. “It’s just so surreal. As soon as I got home after that vacation, it felt like nothing but a dream. You felt like nothing but a dream. And now…all these years later…it’s⁠—”

“Unbelievable,” I mutter, feeling exactly the same. While I might have held out hope that one day I’d find her again, I knew deep down that the chances were slim.

I stare at the final image of us. We’re smiling, but it’s right before I was forced to say goodbye and watch her drive away.

That naive little boy didn’t think it would be forever. He was convinced we’d meet again.

Sometimes, I wonder where he went, because at some point along the way, I didn’t only lose my family, but I lost a lot of that hope and the positive outlook he had on life.

Things are changing, though. With Sienna in my life, I feel more and more of that little boy coming back to life every day.

“We can take this home with us, right?”

“Yeah, if you want,” she says, turning to face me.

“Good. And I think it’s time to start making new ones.”

“New scrapbooks?” she asks, her brows pinching.

“Yeah, and memories together.”