***
Back in the grocery store, I faced the young woman wearing the same silver medallion and tried to keep my voice level.
“Could I ask… what’s your mom’s name?”
She hesitated while her hand stayed on the locket. “Why are you asking?”
I still loved Lucy.
“I know this is strange,” I said. “I know how this sounds. But I gave a locket exactly like that one to someone many years ago. It had the same stone and chain. Even the same small scratch near the setting. I just need to understand how you came to have it.”
She looked at me for a long moment, weighing something.
“Her name was Lucy.”
I gripped the cart handle.
“LUCY?”
“I gave a locket exactly like that one to someone many years ago.”
“I have to go,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
She was at the door before I’d processed what had happened, and then she was outside, walking fast.
I left my cart exactly where it was and followed her.
I want to be clear that I’ve never done anything like this in my life. I’m a 53-year-old man who teaches high school history and goes to bed before 11 p.m.
Following strangers is not something I do.
I left my cart exactly where it was and followed her.
But I had just heard someone use Lucy’s name in the past tense while wearing her locket, and my feet were already moving.
I kept a full block between us, enough that the young lady wouldn’t notice.
She walked six blocks into a residential neighborhood with modest houses and mature trees. The kind of street where people have lived for a long time.
She turned up the front path of a pale blue house and went inside without looking back.
She walked six blocks into a residential neighborhood.
I sat in my rental car across the street for a while, hands on the wheel, talking myself in and out of knocking on that door.
Every reasonable part of my brain had something to say about how this looked. About what I was doing. About the line between grief and something less dignified.
Then I thought about that scratch on the locket, and I got out of the car.
I walked toward the door with an uneasy feeling and knocked.
Every reasonable part of my brain had something to say about how this looked.
Footsteps approached. The door opened halfway, the chain still latched.
The young lady stared at me, recognition flashing across her face.
“It’s him. Dad, it’s him!” she shouted over her shoulder. “The man from the store.”
A man in his late 50s stood in the center of the room. He was broad-shouldered, gray at the temples, and his expression shifted quickly from surprise to something guarded and calculating.
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