fix bicycle gears but not how to explain death to a child. They lived in a modest house outside Columbus, Ohio, where the hallway still carried faint marks from the time Emma had measured herself against the wall with a purple crayon. Daniel owned a small bicycle repair shop called Reed Cycles, and before Hannah's death they had not been wealthy, but they had laughed easily. Afterward, there seemed to be entire weeks when laughter felt like a kind of disloyalty.
Hannah had been the kind of mother who turned ordinary things into traditions. She drew pictures on the paper bags that held Emma's school lunches. She invented elaborate names for the weeds growing by their back fence. Every year on Emma's birthday, she hid a tiny paper star somewhere in the house. Finding it led Emma to a second star, and then a third, until the trail ended with a present that was usually small and always personal. Once it was a jar of sea glass collected during a summer trip. Another year it was a red ribbon Hannah had saved from her own childhood. The pleasure came from knowing someone had remembered every detail of who Emma was.
The silver necklace had belonged to Hannah's mother. Its star pendant was scratched on one edge, and the chain had been repaired twice before Daniel ever met Hannah. She wore it to her college graduation, their courthouse wedding, and the morning Emma was born. When Emma was six, she asked whether she could wear it one day. Hannah answered that the necklace would become hers on her tenth birthday, when she was old enough to understand that valuable things were not always expensive. Daniel remembered the exchange because Hannah had turned toward him afterward and said, with mock severity, "You're the witness. Don't let me forget."
But Hannah never reached Emma's tenth birthday. After the funeral, Daniel placed the necklace inside a navy-blue jewelry box at the back of his bedroom closet, beneath a folder of insurance forms. He could not bear the sight of it. Every time he thought about the promise, he imagined trying to explain where the woman who had made it was. When Emma occasionally asked about her mother, Daniel answered, but he often found a reason to stop the conversation before his voice broke. His grief was honest. So was his daughter's. What he did not yet understand was that avoiding his pain sometimes meant leaving Emma alone with hers.
Celeste appeared in their lives the following spring. She was helping organize a charity cycling event for a local children's hospital and came into Daniel's shop because one of the donated bicycles needed its brakes adjusted. She was polished, articulate, and almost startlingly