She barely knew him when the package arrived. No bigger than a shoe box. So heavy she already resented whatever it contained. “Sociopath” she’d called him in the last conversation. What kind of person lives without regret?

Tearing the brown shipping paper to reveal a knotted, dusty box did nothing to soften her. She whispered the word “Reliquia” when she ran her finger over it roughly hand-carved on the lid, the faint smell of cedar released. Her skin pricked and she looked around the room, certain she’d heard a whisper back, “reach inside me.”

“Is this a joke?” she scoffed, peering at its emptiness, mystified now by its weightiness. Then she heard it again, shivering at the invitation: “reach inside me.”

Her fingers had barely broken the plane when ivy twined around her hand, wrapped itself up her arm, yet it wasn’t fear which overwhelmed, but the love of his grandmother’s embrace, the warmth of the house at the foot of Monte Perdido where he spent his summers. She next lifted a track shoe from the empty box feeling the exhaustion of his leaden legs which left him last. A megaphone howled his father’s beratements and belittlements. His Silicon Valley career a confetti of pink slips and ticker tapes. Every reliquia she pulled from the empty box another signpost from his traveled roads.

She groped the emptiness, desperate to find another piece of him. She finally felt a crinkling candy wrapper, a salted caramel. Mouth watering, she consumed him, caramel sticking in her teeth. And suddenly, for the first time, he was licking each hemisphere of her cerebrum. With each lick, another of her own regrets vanished.