And what we built, in that hallway cabinet, was the middle path between erasure and enshrinement: a place where Rebecca could be honored without being worshipped, remembered without being a chain, present in the house the way a beloved grandparent’s portrait is present — a source of belonging rather than sorrow.

It took some getting right.

But we got it right, together, and Hannah chose most of what went in it, because it was her mother, and her memory, and her right to decide how it would live in her home.

That last part — that Hannah chose — was the point of the whole exercise, more than the cabinet itself.

Because the deepest thing Pamela had stolen from my daughter was not a bedroom or a photograph or a place in a wedding.

It was authorship.