From the window, Sasha sees Grandpa in the courtyard, pulling the yellow bursts of dandelions out of a bed of radishes, as she holds the box like a stone weighing on her palms, something she already knows she shouldn’t have taken down from its deliberate hiding place. Something that ought to have stayed out of sight where it belonged, where someone placed it not to be found. But it is too late. It is in her hands now, claiming its space with sudden urgency, deliberate and jarring.

She lowers herself onto the stool and peers out the window again, as if looking away would make the box in her hands vanish back into its shelter on the top shelf of the armoire. Grandpa has pulled out the last dandelion and is now cranking the rusty handle of the courtyard well, waiting for the bucket to creak its way up from the echoey darkness into daylight. A watering can is waiting at his feet, ready to be carried to the bed of carrots and beets. Sasha pulls up the lid of the box. Inside is a book-size square wrapped in the kind of cloth Grandma used to make cottage cheese. Inside the cloth, after she untangles it, is a piece of cardboard bent in two, held by a rubber band. Someone has made an effort to disguise what is inside, trying to hide it not only from an outsider accidentally stumbling onto it but also from himself.

She weighs the folder on her palm, as if its heft could determine its importance, as if the act of staring at its brown cover could reveal what is contained inside. Behind the window, Grandpa is lugging a watering can in one hand and a bucket in the other, his shoulders stooping under their weight, his knees nearly buckling. She didn’t know he was so old. Or did he suddenly get old because Grandma is no longer here to fill him with reasons to go on, reasons beyond the garden with its watering and weeding?

The rubber band around the folder crumbles under her fingers, but the creased cardboard doesn’t spring open, kept folded for years. How many years—five, fifteen, twenty? How long has this box been sitting on the top shelf of the armoire, away from anyone’s reach?

Sasha doesn’t want to wedge herself between the past and present again; she doesn’t want to become complicit in another secret. But with the empty box in her hand, she knows she already has.