But not all of it. The dealer’s daughter ran an online storefront for the pieces she thought were “story pieces,” her word, and she kept listings up long after they sold, because the photographs were good.

Nolan found the photograph in November, on a laptop, at eleven o’clock at night, in a listing that had been marked SOLD for nineteen months.

He’d been searching engraved gold locket Cora in various orders for weeks.

He came into my room and put the screen in front of my face without saying anything.

Oval. The little chased border. The dent near the hinge from when I was nine and dropped it on the bathroom tile at my grandmother’s house and told nobody for a week.

It had sold to a woman in Athens, Tennessee, for two hundred and twenty dollars.