“Yes.”
Dan said nothing. He pressed his lips together and looked at the table, and in that moment he looked less like my 50-something brother and more like the teenager who used to get caught doing things he knew better than to do.
“He told me the man’s name.”
“It was just going into the ground, Maureen,” he said finally, his voice dropping. “Mom was going to bury it. It would’ve been gone forever.”
“What did you do, Dan?”
“I went into Mom’s room the night before her funeral and swapped it with a replica,” he confessed. “I overheard her asking you to bury it with her. I couldn’t believe she wanted it in the ground.”
He rubbed a hand over his face. “I had the necklace appraised. They told me what it was worth, and I thought… it was being wasted. That at least one of us should get something from it.”
“Mom never asked you what she’d want,” I retorted. “She asked me.”
He couldn’t answer that. I let the silence do what words couldn’t.
“I couldn’t believe she wanted it in the ground.”
When he finally apologized, it came out slowly, without any of the usual deflection. No “but you have to understand” attached to the end of it.
Just sorry, plainly meant, which was the only version I could do anything with.
I left his house with my heart heavier than when I’d walked in and drove home.
I’d always known the boxes were up there in the attic. Old things from my mother’s house — books, letters, and small objects that accumulate across a life.
I’d always known the boxes were up there in the attic.
I hadn’t opened them since we’d packed them after she died. I found her diary in the third box, tucked inside a cardigan that still faintly held her perfume.
Sitting on the attic floor in the afternoon light, I read until I understood everything.
My mother had inherited the necklace from her mother, and her sister believed it should’ve gone to her instead. It was a wound that never healed: two sisters who’d grown up sharing everything, divided permanently by a single object.
Mom’s sister, my aunt, had died years later, and the estrangement had never resolved itself.
It was a wound that never healed.
