I grab Zingo! and Candy Land, go into the living room, and start setting up the Candy Land board. Better to start with the game I actually know, I think, as I unfold the board and start arranging the cards into a neat pile.

And then something falls onto the floor, slipping from a corner of the cardboard box, underneath a mess of bright plastic playing pieces. It’s a bracelet, real gold judging from its untarnished surfaces, and I reach to put it back into the shallow box, wondering why anyone would keep their jewelry in here. And then.

Then the gray light streaming in from outside shines on the charms, little hearts, and my throat closes up, my heart racing, my hand shaking so hard I drop the bracelet back on the hardwood floor like I’ve seen a ghost. Because it is a ghost, a token from another life, somehow planted here for me to see, and all I can think of is the button off my friend’s dead grandmother’s old shirt we used in eighth grade to summon her, eight girls sitting around a ouija board.

I step back, a backward crab walk, and crouch like that, staring at the charms, the dainty cursive on each heart, Isabella, Octavia, and the largest one, dwarfing the two others, Greta.

My mother’s, my aunt’s, and my grandmother’s names.

I blink rapidly, willing the engravings to fade, to dissolve into the gold, the bracelet into a plaything, junk thrown into a battered cardboard box that looks like it’s been around for decades.

But it doesn’t change. Rather, as if to mock me, the rain abruptly stops, and a ray of sunlight illuminates the bracelet like a halo, beaming toward me. And without thinking, I grab it and shove it in my jeans pocket and continue to set the game out on the floor.

Anneliese comes home a few hours later, towing bags full of groceries. She had an interview to substitute-teach at a private elementary school in Brooklyn, but when I ask her about it, she waves me off, tells me that it’ll make her nervous to recount the meeting in detail.

I want to reach into my pocket, dangle the bracelet in front of her and watch her face as she reacts to it. I’m itching for it, my fingers tapping a rhythm as we prepare dinner, vegetarian lasagna. I almost slice the mozzarella with the plastic still on, and I nick my fingers grating the parmesan. If Anneliese can tell I’m distracted, she doesn’t say it.