I had been too tired to sort through any of it carefully.

The officer gave me a report number and explained how to request a copy once the initial documentation was ready.

He also advised me to repair the window and preserve the recording in its original form.

I followed his instructions because small practical steps were all I could manage.

Leah came into the hallway after the officers left.

She looked at the scattered thread as though the tiny objects had been knocked out of their proper places in the world.

“Why would Mrs. Quinn steal Grandma’s sewing stuff?”

I said I did not know yet.

Leah picked up a blue button and turned it over.

“Grandma sewed this on my school coat,” she said.

I remembered that coat and the winter my mother had insisted on replacing every button herself.

There were seven of them, though the coat had needed only six.

My mother had always kept one spare.

I studied the envelope in its clear protective sleeve and saw an address written in cramped blue ink.

The street name was familiar, but the city was not.

It was a small town ninety miles away called Briar Glen.

Under the address, someone had written a date from thirty-one years earlier.

The date was the week I was born.

That night, Leah and I ate grilled cheese sandwiches in the living room because I could not stand the sight of the kitchen window.

A contractor had covered the opening with plywood, leaving the room smelling of pine dust and wet putty.

I had promised Leah I would not open the envelope until we understood why Martha wanted it.

My daughter took that promise as a reason to ask every question she could think of.

“Did Grandma know Mrs. Quinn before we moved here?”

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

“Then why did she know what was inside Grandma’s tin?”

That was the question I had been avoiding.

My mother, Evelyn Pierce, had lived in the same house for forty years, with only short periods away to care for relatives.

Martha Quinn had moved next door just eleven months before Evelyn’s death.

At the time, my mother had been weak, taking medication, and sleeping in a chair beside the bedroom window.

I had visited most weekends, rushing between my nursing shifts and Leah’s school commitments.

Martha had always appeared helpful.

She left soup at the door and once drove my mother to an appointment when my car broke down.