I need to explain about my grandmother, because otherwise you won’t understand why this, of everything, was the wound that didn’t close.

My mother worked two jobs when I was small, and it was my grandmother who raised me in the hours between — who taught me to cook the very dishes I’d made for that anniversary dinner, who sat up with me when I was sick, who told me, over and over, in a hundred small ways, that I was worth something at a time in my life when no one else was around to say it.

She wore that emerald ring every day of my childhood.

The bracelet had been her mother’s.

The locket held a photograph of the three of us — her, my mother, me — taken on a porch one summer, the only picture that existed of all three generations together.

When she died, those three pieces were what she left me, and they were not jewelry to me.