“All I had of me mother was that photograph,” she said. “She’s not smiling, and I reckoned that life always weighed heavy on her, even before all us children came along. But then you found the pin.” She twirled it and the beads became a blur of colour. “I don’t know much about her for sure, but it helps me to imagine her happy, knowing something beautiful came to her.”

I thought of the photographs of Lily all around my house, the clothes that still hung in Da’s wardrobe, the blue envelopes. I thought of the story Ditte told me every birthday. My mother was like a word with a thousand slips. Lizzie’s mother was like a word with only two, barely enough to be counted. And I had treated one as if it were superfluous to need.

The trunk was still open, and I looked at the words carved into it. Then I looked at the pin, so fine against Lizzie’s rough hand, despite its bandy leg. We both needed proof of who we were.

“I’ll fix it,” I said, and I reached out, thinking I could straighten it by sheer force of will. Lizzie let me take it and watched as I tried.

“Good enough,” she said, when I finally gave up. “And the sharpening stone might work on the point.”

The balloon in my chest burst, and a flood of emotion escaped. Tears and sniffling and a fractured apology: “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.”

“I know you are, me little cabbage.” Lizzie held me until the blubbering stopped, stroked my hair and rocked me, as she had when I was small, though I had almost outgrown her. When it was over, she returned the pin to its place in front of the picture of her mother. I kneeled on the hard floor to close the trunk. My fingers brushed the lettering, rough and untidy. But permanent. The Dictionary of Lost Words.

Mr. Crane was leaving early. When he saw me sitting under the ash, he gave neither a word nor a smile. I watched him stride towards his bicycle, shove his satchel around to his back and swing one leg over the saddle. He didn’t notice when a bundle of slips fell to the ground behind him. I didn’t call out.

There were ten slips pinned together. I put them between the pages of the book I’d been reading and returned to the ash.

Distrustful was written on the top-slip in Mr. Crane’s untidy hand. He had defined it as Full of or marked by distrust in oneself or others; wanting in confidence, diffident; doubtful, suspicious, incredulous. I didn’t know what incredulous meant and shuffled through the slips for a sense of it. My discomfort grew with each quotation. Distrustfull miscreants fight till the last gaspe, wrote Shakespeare.