The locket was sitting right on top of the registration I was actually looking for. Small gold oval, a little scratched up. I figured it was something for me. A surprise he forgot about. I almost smiled when I opened it.

Inside was a woman I’d never seen. And a little girl next to her, maybe eleven or twelve. The girl had a thin chain around her neck with a tiny charm on it. I had to hold the whole thing up under the dome light to make out what the charm said. Three letters. J.L.M. Those are my initials. Jennifer Lynn Marshall.

I closed the locket. Then I opened it again, like the letters were going to be different the second time. They weren’t. I turned it over and there was an engraving on the back. “Always, D.” My husband’s name is David. I sat in that cold car in the driveway for a long time, just holding it.

Here’s the thing you need to know about David and me. We wanted a baby more than we wanted air. We tried for years. Doctors, shots, the whole circus. About thirteen years ago we did one last round, the expensive kind, and I got the call that it didn’t take. I remember the nurse’s voice, real soft, “I’m so sorry, it didn’t hold.” I fell apart. I stopped trying after that. We just stopped talking about it and got old together and I told myself that was fine.

So I’m sitting there with this locket and none of it fits. We never had a daughter. There was no daughter. I went inside and David was already asleep on his back with one arm hanging off the bed, snoring like always. I stood in the doorway and watched him for a second.

Twenty-one years I’d slept next to that man. I took my phone, photographed the woman’s face, and went and sat on the bathroom floor and searched.

Nothing came up. No name, no match, nothing. But there was a tiny stamp inside the lid of the locket. “Garrison’s. Oak St.” I knew that place. We drove past it every week. The next morning I told David I was running errands and I drove straight there with my hands shaking on the wheel.

The owner was an older guy, real polite. I put the locket on the glass counter and asked if he could tell me anything about it. He put on his glasses and looked it up in his computer. “That’s a custom piece,” he said. “Ordered thirteen years ago. We’ve restrung it twice.” Thirteen years. The same year that nurse called me. He kept reading. “We also made a small pendant. Girl’s initials. J.L.M. Account’s under a David Marshall.”