Hand-carved. Old. The kind of thing you’d keep something precious in.
“It’s her box,” Greg said. “It’s Grace’s box.”
And the world tilted, because I knew that name, even though we had not said it out loud in almost thirty years.
Grace.
Our first baby.
The one we lost.
Before Michael. Before Emma. A daughter, born too soon, who lived for two days in a hospital and then didn’t, thirty years ago, when we were young and shattered and had no idea how to hold a grief that size.
We had never talked about her. Not really. We’d folded her away, the way people did back then, the way we were told was healthy — “you’re young, you’ll have more” — and we’d gone on and had Michael and Emma and a whole life, and we had never once, in thirty years, said her name at the dinner table.
