It was gone. It had been seven years of mortgage and groceries and a daughter’s braces, and then five years of lawyers and therapy and flying to Oregon and Seattle and Anchorage.

We settled for what I could raise, which meant the house.

So in August we packed the living room, and I took the ceramic lighthouse off the second shelf, where it had sat between a school photograph and Daniel’s boating manual for twelve years.

It still has the hole in the bottom where I went in with a kitchen knife. The felt hangs off one side. I have dusted around that hole for five years the way I dusted the whole thing for seven before it.

I offered it to Sophie.

“No,” she said. “You keep it.”