PART 1
I was stirring my coffee when I saw it.
The chain caught the morning light — a thin gold thread sliding against a navy sweater two tables away. The girl couldn’t have been more than twenty-two. She was hunched over a laptop, earbuds in, completely unaware that my heart had just stopped.
I knew that locket. I’d know it in a dark room, underwater, in my sleep.
Clara wore it every day of our seventeen years together. A tiny oval of brushed gold, barely the size of a thumbprint, with a single sapphire chip at the clasp. I’d fastened it around her neck the morning of our wedding. I’d kissed it goodbye when I closed her casket two years ago.
It was buried with her.
Or so I thought.
My coffee sloshed over the rim. I didn’t feel it burn my hand. I was already standing, already walking, already violating every boundary of polite society. The girl looked up when my shadow fell across her screen. Brown eyes. Startled.
“Where did you get that?” My voice sounded like gravel.
She touched the locket instinctively. “Excuse me?”
“That necklace. The locket. Where did you get it?”
Her hand curled around it protectively. “It was my mother’s. Who are you?”
“Your mother.” The word tasted like ash. “What’s her name?”
“That’s none of your business.” She started to pack up.
I grabbed her wrist — too hard, I realized too late. “Please. My wife. She had a locket exactly like that. She died. She’s buried with it. I need to know how you have this.”
The girl froze. Something shifted in her expression. Not fear. Recognition, maybe. Or the beginning of a different kind of fear.
She opened the locket.
I saw the photograph inside, and the floor tilted.
It was Clara. Young Clara. Maybe nineteen, twenty years old. Smiling on a beach I’d never seen, with a man I’d never met, holding a baby wrapped in a yellow blanket.
The girl’s voice came from very far away. “Her name was Clara. She gave me this the day she gave me away.”
PART 2