We drove down to Athens on a Saturday in January, three years almost to the week from the courtroom, and she met us at a diner off the highway because her house was a mess, she said, which I doubt.

She was small and had beautiful posture. She’d brought it in a velvet pouch inside a Christmas tin.

She put it in Nolan’s hand and not mine.

“You’re the one who found it,” she said.

And Nolan — who is eleven now, and taller than the counter, and who will tell you that this whole thing was mostly database searching and shouldn’t count as anything — turned around in a diner booth off I-75 and worked the catch and put my grandmother’s locket around my neck himself, and got it on the second try.

I didn’t hold it together. I’d like to report otherwise.