This drawer of her mother’s held socks, tights, and stockings, and in the very back, a small wooden box filled with old keepsakes. Her father had no reason to know about it and most likely he never had. Robin, though, had known about the box since she was twelve years old. She’d caught her mother looking through it once and stayed in the back of the room like Harriet the Spy, watching. Her mother had been trying on a pair of earrings—big gaudy clip-ons made of painted seashells. Not Mom’s taste at all, which had piqued Robin’s curiosity enough for her to sneak back into the room and take out the box weeks later, when she was alone in the house . . .

Robin had found it fascinating, the idea that her mother would have a tiny collection of things no one knew about, not even Dad. And for a few weeks during that hot, sleepy July between sixth and seventh grade, the box had been a summer romance—something Robin would sneak in to look at whenever she could and think about whenever she couldn’t. She’d never said a word about the secret box to anyone, just like she’d never said a word about her father’s pack of cigarettes. Grown-ups kept secrets, apparently. It wasn’t her right to reveal them.

By the time September rolled around and school started again, she’d stopped sneaking in to look at it. The box became something she kept in the back of her mind in the same way Mom kept it in the back of the drawer: not thrown away and certainly not forgotten, but never dwelled on, never spoken of.

This morning, Robin had opened the drawer and found that box in the exact same spot, as though no time had passed. She’d pulled it out, removing the seashell earrings and the add-a-pearl necklace, the souvenir penny pressed into an oval and embossed with a star and the word Corsica. She’d removed the tiny magnifying glass, the rainbow rubber ball, and a few more pieces of costume jewelry—gently, as though these were living things, deserving of kindness.

With the box mostly empty, Robin had found what she’d been looking for. She’d put everything back except for that one item—a Polaroid picture, so faded at this point, you could barely make out the image. She’d placed the box back in its spot and shoved the picture into her bag—where it still was right now.

ROBIN LET GO of her mother’s hand. She unzipped her bag, removed the picture, and gazed at it—a girl with short blond hair, smiling for the camera. The girl was young and coltishly skinny, as though she still hadn’t found her true form. The photo was blurred, the blonde’s features almost completely faded, but Robin could make out the smile—her mother’s dreamy, warm, slightly crooked smile.