Disappointed, I pad down the hall to my room. I look under the bed, run my eyes over the family pictures atop the bedside table, then search the bureau drawers. My heart gives a hopeful leap when I find a stack of pictures in the bottom bureau drawer, but they are all of Gram, Grandpa, and Dad right after he was born. Turns out, he really was a fat baby.

The last place I search is the closet.

And that’s where I find it, tucked up in the very darkest corner, behind one of Gram’s floor-length dresses.

A small green shoebox with faded golden writing.

It takes me a while to realize that I’ve seen it before.

It was the winter afternoon years ago when I’d come in to find Gram looking out the window at the snow, and she’d been angry at me for not knocking. She had been so strange that day, telling me I didn’t ever have to come to Morning Glory Cottage if I didn’t want to. I want this house to be a happy place for you, she’d said.

There had been two things on her lap: The World at the End of the Tunnel by R. M. Wildsmith. And this shoebox, which she’d shoved under the bed. But then we’d started reading The World at the End of the Tunnel for the first time, and I had barely given the box another thought.

But now, all these years later, here it is.

I pry it open carefully because the box is really old, the cardboard soft under my fingers.

Inside, there are three things. The first is a book of poems by somebody called Gerard Manley Hopkins. I flip through it to see that someone—Gram, probably—has underlined certain phrases and words and starred some of the poems.

I put the book aside in favor of the next thing I see in the box: a picture.

It’s a framed family portrait of a man, a woman, and a girl. The man stands over them both, with a hand on each of their shoulders. The photo is in color, but deeply faded. And there’s something very odd about it. Nobody is smiling.

The man kind of resembles Dad, except he wears a smugly satisfied expression that I can’t imagine on Dad’s face. The woman has an upturned nose and a prim smirk that I can’t quite call a smile because there’s no joy in it.

They certainly look stern.