When I lifted it, it gave off a smell I will never forget as long as I live — mothballs, and the faint medicinal sweetness of the lavender salve she rubbed on her hands, and underneath those, something I can only call the smell of time itself, of a thing that has been close to a body for decades.

I told myself it had likely been nothing.

A confused gesture from a dying mind, a last muddled goodbye that my grief was trying to turn into a message.

I had half decided to simply fold it up and set it away on a closet shelf, to keep not because it held any secret but because it had held her head.

And then, half without meaning to, I slid my hand in through the torn seam, meaning only to smooth the bunched cotton, to tidy the poor thing, to do one last small tender act of care for an object she had loved.