I don’t know who chose them, I said, because I did not, and because I was not going to invent a tenderness I could not verify, not even a small one, not even to be kind, because I had seen what inventing tendernesses had cost this family.

Should I send it back, she asked, and I understood that she was testing, carefully, whether being hurt by someone meant you had to refuse everything they had touched.

No, I said.

It was given to you.

You can keep it if you want.

She turned the key once more and set the music box in her treasure box, and then she said, I’m keeping it, but I’m not putting it on the shelf where I can see it from my bed, and I thought that was, in eight-year-old form, exactly the right relationship to have with a gift from someone who had not come: keep the good thing, do not pretend it did not also contain a hurt, and do not give it the best spot in the room.

I did not explain any of the adult shape of it to her, the transfers, the lie, the number, the version of her mother that had been handed around the family.