Chapter 1: The Photograph on the Counter
The picture was old enough that the corners had curled inward, and the faces were faded into soft sepia. But I still recognized her instantly.
“Nana,” I breathed.
She looked younger in the photo, maybe in her twenties, standing beside a man in front of a narrow brick storefront with a painted sign above the window. Her smile was bright, open, alive in a way I had only known through framed pictures and memory. But it wasn’t Nana that made my knees go weak.
It was the man standing beside her.
He was younger, of course. His shoulders were straighter, his face unlined. But the eyes were the same.
The appraiser’s eyes.
I looked up so fast I nearly dropped the velvet box. “Who is that?”
His mouth trembled before he answered.
“That,” he said softly, “is me.”
For a second, the whole shop seemed to tilt. The ticking clock behind me grew louder, as if time itself had stepped out from the walls to watch.
“You?” I whispered.
He nodded, then ran a hand over his face like he was trying to steady himself against the past.
“Your grandmother’s name… was Eleanor, wasn’t it?”
Nobody had called Nana by her first name in years. Not in front of me, anyway. To me, she had always just been Nana—warm hands, Sunday candy, quiet prayers in the kitchen before anyone else woke up.
“Yes,” I said. “Eleanor James.”
His eyes closed. When they opened again, they were wet.
“I was supposed to marry her.”
