I was pricing paperbacks at the church rummage sale when a woman set a box of old books on my table. On top was a blue cloth reader Dick and Jane. My breath caught. I opened the front cover. There, in a child’s pencil, in the crooked letters traced at seven: this book belongs to Neva and Fern Coyle. My sister and me. They split us into different homes in 1959. I was six. Fern was four. I never saw her again.

The basement smelled of old paper, damp wool, and stale coffee from the urn by the double doors. Folding tables stretched down the center aisle, piled high with donated mugs, mismatched sweaters, and board games missing their pieces. I had volunteered to help sort the boxes because sitting at home on a Saturday left too much room for old memories, and I needed the distraction of busy hands.

When that box landed on the linoleum, the heavy cardboard scraped against the metal table frame with a dry sound that cut right through the murmur of the room. I reached out instinctively to steady the stack before the top books could slide off and hit the floor. That was when I saw the blue cloth binding and the faded silver lettering stamped into the spine.

I had not thought about that specific primer in decades, yet the exact shade of blue came back to me instantly.

It was the color of the reading table in the corner of our first schoolroom before everything broke apart. My fingers felt clumsy and cold as I slid my thumb under the front cover and pulled it back against the stiff binding.

The pencil marks were unmistakable. We had shared a single stub of a yellow pencil with no eraser left, taking turns pressing down hard so the letters would not smudge when we slid the book back into our shared canvas satchel. My six-year-old hand had guided Fern’s four-year-old fingers to form the curves of our last name. Coyle.

I looked up at the woman who had dropped the box, waiting for her to move on to the housewares or turn back toward the clothing racks. She stayed right there, her hands resting on the edge of the wooden table, looking down at the book I was still holding open. Her hair was short and gray, curling softly around a face that stopped my breath for a second time.

It was my mother’s chin. The same sharp curve and slight cleft that used to catch the light whenever she leaned over the kitchen stove. And when she parted her lips to ask if I needed help sorting the rest of the boxes, I saw the exact same gap in her front teeth that I stared at in the bathroom mirror every single morning.

The realization did not hit me like a sudden crash. It felt more like the ground beneath my feet had simply dissolved, leaving me floating in a space where time had stopped back in 1959. My voice came out thin and raspy when I finally managed to push the words past my throat.

“Where did you get this book?” I asked.

She blinked, her eyes darting from my face down to the open cover and back up again. Her fingers twitched against the edge of the table.

“It was my sister’s,” she said, her voice dropping into a register that made the hairs on my arms stand up. “I’ve been looking for her since…”

She trailed off, her breathing turning shallow as she stared at me with an intensity that felt entirely too heavy for a Saturday morning church basement.

“Since when?” I asked, my own voice shaking so badly I could barely form the syllables.

“Since they took us,” she whispered. “Since 1959.”

The noise of the rummage sale seemed to fade into a dull hum, as if someone had turned down the volume on a radio. People were still browsing the sweater racks a few yards away, a woman was laughing softly near the checkout boxes, and the fluorescent lights above us gave off their steady, low buzz. None of it reached us. We were standing in a pocket of air that belonged entirely to the past.

“Neva?” she said, testing the name on her tongue as if it were a foreign word she had not spoken out loud in fifty years.

“Fern,” I managed to say.

She reached across the narrow gap of the table, her hand trembling as she touched the back of my fingers where they rested on the blue cloth cover of the primer. Her skin was warm, and the knuckles were slightly swollen with arthritis, just like mine.

We stood there across the stacks of discarded paperbacks, neither of us moving, letting the reality of those decades wash over us until the tears finally spilled over our eyelashes without either of us trying to stop them.

“I kept the book,” she whispered, her thumb brushing against my wrist. “It was the only thing they let me take in the brown paper bag.”

“I thought about you every day,” I told her, my voice breaking completely on the last word. “Every single day since they put us in those different cars.”

She shook her head slowly, a faint, disbelieving smile breaking through her tears as she looked at my face, searching for all the years she had missed.

“We’re not losing each other again,” she said.

“No,” I answered, gripping her hand tightly across the table. “We’re not.”