I buried my mother with her most precious heirloom 25 years ago. I was the one who placed it inside her coffin before we said goodbye. So imagine my face when my son’s fiancée walked into my home wearing that exact necklace, right down to the hidden hinge.
I’d been cooking since noon that day.
Roast chicken, garlic potatoes, and my mother’s lemon pie from the handwritten recipe card I’d kept in the same drawer for 30 years.
When your only son calls to say he’s bringing the woman he wants to marry, you don’t order takeout. You make it mean something.
I wanted Claire to walk into a home that felt like love, and I had no idea what she was about to walk in wearing.
Will arrived first through the door, grinning the way he used to as a kid on Christmas morning. Claire came in right behind him.
She was lovely.
I hugged them both, took their coats, and turned toward the kitchen to check the oven.
Then Claire slipped off her scarf, and I turned back.
The necklace was resting just below her collarbone. A thin gold chain with an oval pendant. A deep green stone in the center, framed by tiny engraved leaves so fine they looked like lace.
My hand found the edge of the counter behind me.
I knew that shade of green.
I knew those carvings. I recognized the tiny hinge hidden along the left side of the pendant — the one that made it a locket.
I’d held that necklace in my hands on the last night of my mother’s life and placed it inside her coffin myself.
“It’s vintage,” Claire said, touching the pendant when she caught me staring. “Do you like it?”
“It’s beautiful,” I managed.
“Where did you get it?”
There was no second necklace. There never had been.
So how was it around her neck?
I got through dinner on autopilot. The moment their taillights disappeared down the street, I went straight to the hallway closet and pulled the old photo albums off the top shelf.
My mother wore the necklace in nearly every photograph from her adult life.
I set the photos under the kitchen light and stared at them for a long time.
My eyes hadn’t been wrong at dinner.
The pendant in every photograph was identical to the one resting against Claire’s collarbone. And I was the only person alive who knew about the tiny hinge on the left side. My mother had shown it to me privately the summer I turned 12 and told me the heirloom had been in our family for three generations.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page.
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