There are gifts you forget immediately.
There are gifts you remember fondly.
And then there are gifts that refuse to die quietly, choosing instead to lurk in your life like a cursed object from a low-budget horror film.

This is the story of that gift.

Many years ago, back when my children were still small, when sleep was optional and personal dignity already hung by a thread, my husband attempted something bold. Something intimate. Something… deeply misguided.

He bought me lingerie.

Not good lingerie.
Not “oh, this is surprising.”
Not even “well, he tried.”

This was lingerie that looked like it had been designed by someone who had only ever heard about women through secondhand gossip. It was aggressively synthetic. Architectural in all the wrong places. A color best described as “discount merlot.” It had straps that appeared to serve no known function and an overall vibe that said, I have never met your wife, but I tried.

I thanked him out of politeness. And because my children were nearby.

Later, when no one was watching, I returned it.

The store clerk, who has seen things, did not ask questions. She simply handed me a gift card, heavy with implication, and sent me on my way. I slid it into my wallet and promptly forgot about it.

Or so I thought.

Years passed. The children grew. The wallet came and went from purse to counter to car console. And nestled inside it, quietly aging like a fine and deeply inappropriate wine, was that Lovers Lane gift card.

Then came the book fair.

My middle son, Nicholas, was in elementary school, the golden age of Scholastic catalogs, erasers shaped like food, and books you had to have immediately or your life would be ruined. He needed money. I told him, as I often did, to grab it out of my wallet.

And he did.

He returned moments later. Silent. Pale. Changed.

At the time, I chalked it up to childhood weirdness. Kids are dramatic. Maybe he touched a receipt. Maybe he saw a coupon. Maybe he briefly confronted the concept of adulthood and recoiled.

What I did notice, though, was this: from that day forward, Nicholas refused to go into my purse or wallet.

Not once.

If he needed money, he would ask.
If I told him to grab it himself, he would physically recoil.
“I’ll wait,” he’d say.
“No, it’s fine,” he’d insist.
“I don’t need it that badly.”

At the time, I assumed boundaries. Respect. A polite child who didn’t want to rummage through his mother’s things.

Wrong.

Very wrong.

Fast forward many years. The kids are older. The house is quieter. Conversations wander into territory once unthinkable: mortgages, careers, memories, therapy-adjacent revelations that begin with “I never told you this, but…”

This past summer, Nicholas finally confessed.

It turns out that day at the book fair, when he opened my wallet, he did not simply find money.

He found the card.

The Lovers Lane gift card.

He didn’t know what it was, only that it sounded illegal. Or dirty. Or both. He read it. Processed it. And in that exact moment, the fragile illusion that his parents were just neutral adults who paid bills and cooked dinner shattered.

He told me, very calmly, that he has been haunted ever since.

That he could not touch my purse without imagining things no child should imagine.
That the words “Lovers Lane” burned themselves into his memory like a warning label.
That he has lived his entire life actively avoiding my wallet because he once accidentally made eye contact with proof of my humanity.

I laughed. I cried. I apologized. I laughed harder.

And then, because the universe has timing, we remembered that last year, around this time, my wallet was stolen from my purse while we were in the city celebrating my daughter’s birthday.

Gone forever.

My ID.
My credit cards.
$75 in singles for the Kit Kat drag club, where we were having dinner that night to  celebrate my daughter’s 22^nd birthday.
And yes.

The Lovers Lane gift card.

Free from my possession.

Or so I thought.

Apparently, gift cards do not expire when it comes to emotional damage.

Nicholas looked at me and said, “I just want you to know… I still think about it.”

And that’s when I realized: some gifts reveal the parts of ourselves we carefully set aside when our children are watching. Some linger because they remind us we were once someone else, too. Some exist solely to become legend.

The gift card is gone now. Lost to the city or rehomed to a thief who unknowingly inherited the most cursed object that was ever in my possession. It’s memory will never be laid to rest.

The secret is out.

And Nicholas?
He still won’t touch my purse.

– Annalisa Wilson
The Creative Quill