“What is it?”

“My dad said the soldier had it in his hand.”

I thanked Jim Tuttle for coming. He handed me a card with an address and his phone number and then I stood there on the porch, watching him drive away. From somewhere upstairs came the knocking of a hammer on a nail, a scatter of voices from outside. All that which had disappeared during the telling of Tuttle’s story now drifted back into the living world once more.

I did not uncurl my fist until I had reached the dining room table again, taking my seat at the typewriter and only then gazing with attention at what Jim Tuttle had given me. The chain was delicate but not particularly so and the locket a small shell-shaped piece of metal, silver in color but likely tin, with small dents and scratches here and there from the years. It was difficult to open but I managed, at last, to pry the lid free and sat staring down at the tiny image that might well have been Evelyn Wilson once upon a time but which was, of course, Helen. The woman encased in the shell-shaped tin was faint, the image granular, but where her mother contained within her a fierce beauty this girl was plain, ordinary, and yet she had filled Ray Takahashi’s heart so fully that he held her image with him for all the days of his imprisonment at the camps and all the days of war and held it still upon his return to what he thought, up to the last, was his home. That it had been Helen, and not her mother, who had at last hired the men to chase Ray out of her life was as terrible as it was believable, for was she not, in the end, her mother’s daughter?