I didn’t say anything for a second. I think I just nodded like an idiot. Then I asked him, real quiet, “Who picks the orders up?” He scrolled. “Same woman every time. We keep her on the pickup form, with a photo for ID.” He turned the screen around so I could see it.

And I knew that face. Not from the locket. From before that. From a tiny dorm room with two beds and a poster of some band we both pretended to like. Beth Calloway. My college roommate, sophomore year. We were close once. The kind of close where you tell each other everything at 2 a.m. We lost touch around 2005. The year David and I got married. I always figured she just drifted off like people do.

The jeweler was still talking and I almost missed it. “The most recent order was just a little charm,” he said. “Engraved on the back.” He squinted at the notes. “It says, ‘For the daughter I see every Tuesday.'” I held onto the edge of that counter. Every Tuesday. David had a standing Tuesday thing for as long as I could remember. Poker, he called it. Then it was a client dinner. Then it was just “the Tuesday thing” and I stopped asking because what kind of wife polices poker night.

I drove home doing about forty in a fifty-five, both hands locked on the wheel. My brain kept trying to do the math and refusing to land on the answer. A daughter. His daughter. With Beth. Named with my initials. I kept saying it out loud in the car. “It didn’t take. They told me it didn’t take.” I think I was trying to make it true again.

I sat at the kitchen table the rest of the afternoon and didn’t move.

Didn’t eat. Didn’t cry, even, which surprised me. I just watched the light change on the wall and waited for his truck. When I heard the gravel I got up and set two plates out like a normal Tuesday. On his plate, instead of food, I put the locket. Open. Facing him.

He came in with his keys jingling and that little tired hum he does. “Smells like nothing in here,” he said, kind of joking. Then he saw the plate. He stopped right there in the middle of the kitchen. I watched him look at the locket, then at me, then back down at it. The keys went quiet in his hand.

“Jenny,” he said. That’s all. Just my name.

“Thirteen years,” I said. “I went to Garrison’s.” He pulled the chair out and sat down slow, like his knees hurt. He didn’t pick the locket up. He just stared at the little girl’s face like she could hear him. I asked him the only thing I had left in me. “Who is she.”