It could not now be taken; the years that would have made it meaningful were gone, spent in silence, and no gesture at this late date could retrieve them.

The empty frame was my way of naming the specific thing that had been lost, not the grand abstraction of a broken family but the concrete small absence of a picture that should have existed and never would.

And watching Samantha hold it up in that silent room, I understood that this, more than any returned letter or unopened card, was the truest single object in the whole box.

Everything else documented what Laura had done.