My father closed his eyes.
I looked from one of them to the other. Something was still wrong. Something was missing, like the first letters of the lines on the back of the tag, and I could feel the shape of it without being able to see it.
"Wait," I said. "But then who got it back? If you sold it, and Mom didn't—" I stopped.
I looked at Niva. At Niva holding the camera against her chest, the way she had been holding it since my father handed it to her, not like a gift, not like something new. Like something she had already held many times. Her thumbs were resting in the two places where the leather was polished smooth.
I looked at the block capitals on the tag. Neat and even and a little too pressed. The handwriting of someone who was trying not to have handwriting.
And I thought about the coffee smell in her hair. The extra shifts. The way she had come home last Sunday, late, and gone straight up to our room, and when I went up twenty minutes later the room smelled like acrylic paint, and she'd said she was doing a project for art, and there was a blue smear on the side of her hand that she'd scrubbed at in the bathroom for a long time.
"It was you," I said.
Niva didn't say yes. She didn't say no either. She set the camera down on the table, finally, very carefully, on top of the torn newspaper in the blue box, and she put her hands in her lap, and she looked at them.
"I saw it in March," she said.
My father made a sound like he had been pushed.