“My friend Tess is here. She has news about that old vase. You two catch up and I’ll go see if Peach wants to join us.” Natalie went up to the attic. Bright morning light streamed through the windows at each end of the space. Peach was standing in the middle at full height, his metal tape measure spanning a section of the rotten beam. With the sunlight behind him, he looked like a living sculpture.

Focus, girl, Natalie told herself. “Hey, got a minute?” she asked.

He started, and the tape measure snaked back into its roll.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to sneak up on you. Tess thought you might like to hear what she found out about the vase.”

“Sure,” he said, clipping the tape measure onto his tool belt. “Let’s go.”

As they passed through her apartment, she wondered what he saw when he looked around. It still felt more like her mom’s place than hers, although she’d done some tidying up and rearranging in the living room and tiny galley kitchen. The one area she hadn’t tackled was behind the closet door in the bedroom. The thought of culling through her mother’s clothes and shoes and personal items made her immeasurably sad. Sometimes she was tempted to simply hire a service to scoop everything up and carry it away. But then she feared she might miss something she didn’t know she needed—a special memento or something that might spark a comforting memory for her or her grandfather.

In the back office, Tess set her box on the big library table, then used her phone to scan a code on the box. “Provenance tracking has gone high-tech,” she said.

Natalie felt a flutter of excitement. If the object was worthy of high-tech tracking, that probably meant the vase was something special.

Tess opened the box and took out the vase, which had been carefully packed in layers of bubble wrap. Setting it on the table, she asked, “What do you see when you look at this?”

Grandy put on his glasses. “I’ve seen such things for sale in a hundred shops in Chinatown. It’s quite pretty, isn’t it? Were you able to trace this one?”

“It cleaned up so well,” Natalie said. The figures were pearlescent, delicately formed and surrounded by swirling embellishments. The colors were intense and layered, with a depth that made the details stand out as if three-dimensional. She cringed, remembering how she’d nearly dropped the thing because of a spider.

“It’s not from Chinatown,” Tess said. “Any other guesses?”

“It’s from the Qianlong period in the Qing dynasty,” said Peach.

Natalie threw him a sharp look. He never failed to surprise her with the things he said, seeming to pull them out of his back pocket like a handy tool. “Tess, is that right?”

Her friend nodded.