On my birthday, my father put a copper necklace around my neck and gently said, “It’ll always protect you, sweetheart.”
My husband smirked when he saw it. “It’s just some ugly old thing,” Caleb said. He had always tried to make me take it off.
Not directly at first. Caleb Thorne never began anything directly. He was too polished for that, too careful with the edges of his cruelty.
He would smile at it across a dinner table and say it clashed with my dress. He would touch the chain when we were getting ready for a fundraiser and say I deserved something finer, something more elegant, something that actually suited me. But I wore it for years.
Then one morning, after stepping out of the shower, I looked down and froze. The necklace was gone. The steam in the bathroom had not fully cleared when I reached for the small oak box on the left side of the vanity.
I reached for it the way I did every single morning, without looking, without thinking, the gesture as automatic as breathing. My fingers found the velvet lining. Then nothing.
I looked down. The box was open and empty. The copper necklace was gone.
My first instinct was completely rational. I checked the counter. I checked the floor around the vanity, running my fingers along the grout lines between the tiles.
I pulled the bath mat back and checked beneath it. Nothing. I opened the cabinet under the sink, thinking perhaps it had slipped off the edge and fallen.
The cabinet held only spare soap and a bottle of lavender hand lotion Caleb had picked up for me the previous month, back when he was still performing small gestures with full commitment. No necklace. I straightened and looked at myself in the mirror.
Fog still blurred the glass, and for a moment my reflection looked soft at the edges, uncertain in a way my face never actually was. I pressed my fingers to my collarbone. Eleven years of wearing that necklace had left a faint impression in my skin, a shallow groove I only noticed in moments like this one.
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