That is the detail that undid me first, before I had even fully processed the rest.

In the raw years after Lily died, when Caleb was insisting that we pack her things away and move forward, that locket had disappeared, and I had assumed, in my grief-fogged state, that it had been lost in the general erasure of her, boxed up somewhere or misplaced or thrown out in Caleb’s determined campaign to remove every trace of her from our daily sight.

I had mourned its loss quietly, one more small vanishing in the great vanishing of my daughter.

And now here it was, in my hand, in a gymnasium, and I understood that it had not been lost at all.