Because Dale went quiet, and then, very slowly, he read me a name off the pawn ticket. It was not a stranger’s name. It was Clyde’s own. He had used it. He had stood in that shop that morning, given his real name, handed over the one thing that proved he had never abandoned me, and walked out on a cane believing I had spent forty-one years not caring. Dale gave me the address on the ticket too, a rooming house six blocks from the river, and told me to be gentle, that the man had looked like someone carrying more than a locket.

I did not water the tomatoes. I did not fold the laundry. I put the locket in my coat pocket, the wristband tucked back inside it exactly where he had left it for me, and I drove across town with my hands shaking on the wheel. The rooming house was a sagging blue two-story with a porch light burning in the afternoon gray. I climbed the steps, raised my fist, and knocked. Footsteps. Slow ones. A cane. And then the door opened, and after forty-one years, I was looking straight into Clyde Vance’s face.