As soon as Calvin set the boxes down in the bedroom and left, she found the tiny pin just beneath the one petal of the rose and pushed it. She peered at the man. I have no father. The words seemed to cut her.

“I might,” Rose whispered now. “I just might.” And perhaps, she thought, he was a rider. The source of my genes as a rider! The thought thrilled her. She looked again at the picture. Between the ruff and the sleeveless jacket, he wore another close-fitting but longer jacket. There seemed to be a sprig of something in that jacket’s buttonhole. She couldn’t quite see what it was. She strained to look but soon gave up, as she was eager to open a carton and touch those relics of her own life that seemed unbearably precious.

She took the box cutter that Calvin had brought up, sliced the mailing tape, and tore open the flaps of the carton. She plunged her hands into the annoying Styrofoam peanuts packing materials. There were books. But the first “book” she touched was the diary that her mom had given to her as a birthday present just before her fatal crash. The key was still taped to the back of the diary. Rose had never written in it. Never even unlocked it. Her life had ended on that day in August, and she had no desire to relive any days close to that. She was tempted to throw the diary out. Put it in the trash can in the alley behind her grandmother’s house. She would! She seized it now and quickly ran downstairs. Trash collection was still two days away, but she wanted the diary out of the house.

She knew it was a feeble gesture as she dropped the diary into the can. A kind of tattered symbolic act suggesting one could banish the day her mom’s life had ended. But she also knew that she couldn’t live with that last gift from her mom. She imagined it sitting on her bookshelf staring at her every day, taunting her with the days it held, the blank pages scowling at her. August 15, a monstrous date demanding her acknowledgment. No, she simply would not do it.

Returning to her bedroom, she took a deep breath and began to carefully unpack the rest of her life from the three boxes. There were clothes and fabric for clothes she had yet to make. But best of all, her beloved sewing machine was here at last. The Millennium Falcon. “Millie!” she whispered, and embraced it.