I asked where the car had gone, and Grandma Ruth said Phoenix, and then she cut me a second slice of cake.

I held the frame until my thumbprint showed up on the glass.

Eleven names on a page I had never seen.

A plate missing from a set my great-grandmother had brought down from Virginia.

Nine weeks marked on a calendar in a mediator’s laptop.

Then I laid the photograph face down on the bare oak table and left it there.

The elevator let me off on the fourth floor, and the coffee in the reception area had boiled down to the bottom of the pot.