“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.
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 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.
