The compartment was about two feet deep. Inside were velvet jewelry pouches, a stack of numbered manila folders, a shoebox of photos of people I didn’t know standing in front of their own china cabinets, and a pile of consignment agreements from a company called Whitmore Estate Services. Dolores’s company.
And there, in a blue drawstring pouch, was Laura’s medallion.
For a second I was back in that hospice room. Laura, too thin, pressing the medallion into my palm and folding my fingers over it. “Don’t let it end up in a drawer forever,” she’d said. “Give it to him when he needs something to hold.”
He’d needed something to hold for two years. And it had been sitting fifty feet from his bedroom the whole time.
I wanted to grab it and run. Every instinct I had said take it, it’s ours.
