“You believe him?”

“I believe somebody kept this picture long enough for it to get old.”

She offered to accompany me.

We arranged to meet Spencer and Evelyn at a public library conference room on Monday, after school started.

That gave me two days to reconsider every possible disaster.

Sunday evening I pulled a dented biscuit tin from the back of my closet.

Inside were the last things I had kept from childhood: a hospital bracelet, a black-and-white picture of my mother, and a small scrap of paper with the notes of a melody written in pencil.