She shrugged, putting her hands on her hips. “It just felt like I was leaving it behind in some way. Everything in my life feels so . . . scattered.” She reached for a box but it was too high.

“Let me get that,” Sanjay said. “This one?”

She pointed to a file box second to the top of a tall stack. She could just make out the words Photos, Family, and Mom scrawled in messy black Sharpie. Sanjay was tall enough to retrieve any of the boxes, and she realized with a pang that this was only because he had stacked them for her. He set the box on the ground at her feet, dusting off his hands.

“So, the woman at the auction house located your mom’s ring?”

“I don’t know if she found it yet, but she knows something. I’ll find out in a few hours when I meet with her.” Gemma looked around. “Ugh, of course I forgot scissors! How am I going to get all these—”

Sanjay reached into his messenger bag and produced two pairs of scissors and packing tape to reseal anything they opened. Gemma smiled at him gratefully.

She sliced through the top seam of one box, opening the cardboard flaps to find the photo albums. It was hard to imagine that people used to print out every photo and stick them in these heavy books. And her grandmother had left behind so many albums, it seemed like she must have spent half her time making them. But Gemma was thankful that she had; if all these photos had never been developed, or stuffed away in closets or old shoeboxes somewhere and lost, she’d really have nothing left. Still, she wondered what compelled her grandmother to send them all to her, when she’d heard nothing from the woman for years and years.

The leather-bound albums had thick white pages, double-sided with six photos to a side and protected under a clear sticky sheet. The spines were embossed with the dates, and she had all the albums memorized. Some of the pages had been turned so many times they’d separated from the binding. Her favorite year to look at was 1994, when her parents first got together, and at the turn of the millennium, when she was a little girl. The later albums, the ones just before her parents died, were too upsetting to look at.

Digging around in the box, she found the 1994 album and pulled it onto her lap. Her mother looked so cool, with her white-blond hair nearly down to her waist, dressed in flannel shirts tied around the waist of her sundresses. Even though it had been the grunge era, Paulina couldn’t help but look glamorous.