“You think that now, but you’ll see. But don’t get rid of anything. Please don’t get rid of a single thing. You can always get rid of it, but you can never get it back. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

“I’ll take a few shirts,” she said. “I make bears out of them. I volunteer at a group. We give stuffed bears to families who want them when they’ve lost someone to addiction. They make a request and give us the clothes and we make them a bear. Look.” She showed me a few pictures. It’s just what it sounds like. “I thought I’d make one for myself and one for my parents. I could make you one?”

“I don’t think I could look at it.”

“People find them surprisingly comforting,” she said. “We’ve made almost two hundred. I’ll take an extra shirt, just in case.”

“That’s okay,” I said.

She stood at the closet, a shirtsleeve hanging between her fingers, and it hit her. It comes in waves, big and small, and it’s not always the big ones that get you. “I started making them because of Frank, you know. He was always talking about giving back when I told him I wanted to help. I started because of him,” she said through the sobs. “I never thought I’d be making one for him.” It was a big wave; it got the both of us.

“We hadn’t been in touch in a long time,” Casey said. “It’s only the past few years. After he’d been with you a while, I guess. He was happy, he said. Everything was good for him, he said, maybe for the first time. Did he ever tell you about us?”

“Not a word.”

She laughed but not because it was funny. “I’m not surprised. There was a lot of hurt there. He never got along with our parents. He figured out early on that he was smarter, that they were holding him back. But it got bad in college, then worse after that. He started using in college. Not experimenting, the way some people do, but exploring. That’s how he described it. He was using to try to figure himself out. And he liked the version of him on drugs best of all. He had discovered something, he said. It was all from stuff he was reading, you know. Right? He thought he had it under control. He would never be an addict, he told me. We argued about it, but he had it all figured out.