"Oh," Madison said softly. "It looks like it was always yours."
When Claire went back downstairs that evening, wearing the necklace and carrying the quilt over her arm, her grandmother looked up from the kitchen table and didn't say anything at all. She only pressed her lips together, hard, and nodded once, and went back to her crossword with her eyes shining.
Her mother came down at seven. She was dressed, her hair brushed, her makeup carefully redone, but her eyes were swollen. She stood in the kitchen doorway and looked at Claire, at the quilt and the sapphire at her throat, and for a moment Claire thought she was going to say something cruel.
Instead she said, "Is there any of that grilled cheese left?"
"I'll make you one," Grandma Ruth said.
Diane sat down at the table across from Claire. She didn't apologize. Claire hadn't really expected her to. But she sat there, and she ate the sandwich her mother-in-law made her, and when Claire got up to put her plate in the sink, Diane said, very quietly, without looking up, "The quilt is beautiful."
It wasn't much. But it was the first thing her mother had said about something of hers in a long time.
On the morning of the twenty-sixth, Greg Hollis did something he had not done in Claire's memory. He called a family meeting.
He did it awkwardly, standing in the kitchen in a sweater with the price tag still on the sleeve, clearing his throat twice before anyone looked up. "Everybody. Table. Please. Mom, you too."
They sat. Grandma Ruth at the end, with her tea. Madison and Claire side by side. Diane across from them, her arms folded, her face composed into something careful and blank. Greg did not sit. He stood behind his chair with his hands on the back of it, as if he needed to hold onto something.
"I'm not good at this," he said. "Diane's always been the one who does the talking. So I wrote some things down." He took a folded piece of paper from his pocket, looked at it, and then put it back. "Actually, never mind. I'll just say it."
He looked at Claire.
"This morning I went to the bank as soon as it opened. I transferred twenty-five hundred dollars out of my own savings into a new account. It's in your name, Claire. Only your name. I'm not on it and neither is your mother. That's the money your grandmother gave you, and it's yours, and nobody touches it but you."
Claire stared at him. "Dad, you didn't have to..."
"Yes, I did." He swallowed. "And Madison, your grandmother's check for you. That goes in an account for you, too. Not toward the ski trip. Toward whatever you decide, when you're old enough to decide it."
Madison nodded quickly. "I don't want to go on the ski trip anyway."
Diane's head turned sharply. "Madison."