And I felt the whole room register it — the cheapness of it, sitting there next to the iPads and the cash — but the candle was not the thing that stopped my heart.

Tied around the glass jar with a bit of string was a small handwritten cardboard tag, and I watched Holly’s eyes find the words on it and try to read them, and I read them at the same moment she did. To Brandon’s Girl. Not To Holly. Not even To my granddaughter. Gene had sat down, at some point before this morning, and taken a pen, and written those three words onto a tag with her own hand, and tied it to a four-dollar candle, and put it in a drugstore bag, so that a seven-year-old would open it in front of the whole family and understand exactly where she stood.

The dining room went silent.

A fork stopped halfway to my brother-in-law’s mouth.