Charlotte’s little sneakers stayed turned sideways under the entry bench, where she always kicked them off after playing outside, one toppled against the other, exactly as she had left them, small and scuffed and impossibly empty.

I left all of it where it was, for months, because as long as the cup and the jacket and the sneakers stayed where they belonged, some part of me could pretend, for a half-second at a time, that the people who belonged with them might still walk back through the door.

Grief, I learned, is not only sorrow.

It is also this: the unbearable tenderness of small abandoned objects, the way a child’s sideways shoe can hold more of a person than any photograph, the way you become the keeper of a museum no one else will ever visit, dedicated to three people the rest of the world is already forgetting.

I kept that museum, alone, for six months, while my family sent vacation photos.