Ray pulled a folded square of foil out of his pocket. The last one. He’d taken it off the passenger seat before they towed the car.

“I peeked,” he said, kind of ashamed. “Egg salad. On white. Crusts cut clean off.”

My knees just went out from under me on those church steps, and a man I barely knew caught me by the arm before I hit the ground.

He made me a sandwich every day for three years. The exact same one he made me when I was six. He sat in that lot at noon hoping that one day I’d notice his car, and walk over, and open that passenger door, and sit down and eat lunch with my dad like none of it had ever happened. He kept the seat ready. He kept the door unlocked. A thousand days he packed two lunches, ate one, and carried the other one home untouched.

And every single day, I walked right past him.

I still work there. I still park in that same lot. My desk is by the window, and I can see the third row from where I sit. Some mornings I catch myself looking for a blue Buick that isn’t there anymore, and then I have to remind myself all over again.

The foil one Ray gave me is still in my fridge. I can’t eat it. I can’t throw it out either. It just sits there on the top shelf, and every morning I open the door and look at it and close it again.

People keep telling me he knew that I loved him. That he understood. Maybe. But I never said it. Not once in three years. He drove to that lot a thousand times to say it to me without any words at all, and I couldn’t be bothered to walk forty feet.

I’d give anything to be able to walk through that door one more time and find him sitting there, watching, just waiting for me to come eat.