He had told the collector it wasn’t for sale.
When I asked him why — why he had held a stranger’s locket in a locked drawer for four months on the strength of nothing but a feeling — he shrugged in the way of a man who has seen a great deal of the worst of people across that glass counter and has decided, out of stubbornness, to keep believing in the best of them anyway.
“You’d be surprised, ma’am,” he said, “how often I can tell the difference between somebody selling something they don’t want and somebody selling something that’s killing them to let go of.
You were the second kind.
The second kind comes back, if the world gives them half a chance.
I just held onto it in case the world came through.” He paused, and looked at the locket at my throat.
“Looks like it did.”
I have thought about that man as much as I have thought about the judge.
There is a version of this story that is only about power — my ex-husband’s, and the greater power that finally came down on him.
But that is not the whole of what saved us.