She stared at me for a long minute. She looked at my face, then down at her chest, then back at me. She didn’t look angry. She looked scared. She reached up and unclasped it.

It was a heavy, old-fashioned thing. She held it out on her palm like it was something fragile that might shatter if she moved too fast.

“I bought this at a flea market in 1990,” she said. Her voice was steady, but I saw her fingers tremble as she flicked the latch open. “I’ve worn it every single day for thirty-four years.”

I leaned in. The hinge creaked. The smell of the produce section faded away, replaced by the ghost of my mother’s perfume, or maybe I was just imagining things. There it was. The tiny photograph, worn at the edges, the black-and-white image of her standing in the garden. I reached out and touched the glass. It was cold. It was real.

“That’s her,” I said. I couldn’t say anything else. I just stood there. The world stopped turning. I thought about the bus stop in 1968. I thought about the rain. I thought about how I cried until I couldn’t breathe when I realized it was gone. I spent years trying to remember the exact way her eyes looked in that picture. I was terrified I was going to forget. And here it was, staring back at me from the palm of a stranger’s hand in the middle of a grocery store aisle.

I started to spiral. I thought about all the years that locket had been around. It had been to weddings, I bet. It had been to funerals. It had been to grocery stores and doctor’s offices and maybe even on vacation.

It had lived a whole life while I was busy getting old. It had been loved by this woman. She didn’t know it was mine. She just knew it was beautiful. And that made it worse, somehow. It made the loss feel bigger. If I hadn’t lost it, I would have kept it in a box. I would have put it away in a drawer and forgotten about it. But she had worn it against her heart for thirty-four years. She had given it a life I never could have.

“I’m so sorry,” she whispered. She was crying now. “I didn’t know.”

“It’s okay,” I said. But it wasn’t. It was and it wasn’t.

She tried to hand it to me. She moved her hand toward mine, but I didn’t take it. I couldn’t. If I took it, it would be mine again. But it wouldn’t be the same. The magic was in the fact that it had survived. If I took it back, I was just putting it back in a box. I was ending the story.

“Keep it,” I said.

She looked at me like I was crazy. “I can’t.”