Bear’s eyes filled.
“I didn’t know whether my grandchild was a boy or girl. Didn’t know your name. Didn’t know where you were.”
Emily suddenly felt angry.
At everyone.
At dead people.
At living people.
At sixteen years of silence.
“Why didn’t my mother find you?”
“I don’t know,” Bear said.
Emily turned away.
Then Jack spoke.
“There’s something else.”
Of course there was.
Emily laughed once without humor.
“Apparently there always is.”
“The pendant.”
Jack pointed toward it.
“Caleb was wearing his half the night he died.”
Emily frowned.
“But you said I found it.”
“Exactly.”
Jack leaned forward.
“The police report listed several personal effects. Wallet. Watch. Ring. Boots. Jacket.”
His eyes fixed on Emily.
“The pendant was never recovered.”
Emily’s skin prickled.
Jack explained that Bear and the club had returned to Blackstone Curve repeatedly after Caleb’s death.
They searched the grass.
The drainage ditch.
The embankment.
Nothing.
Eventually they accepted that the necklace had vanished.
Then, sixteen years later, Jack crashed on the same curve.
A winter storm had washed away part of the old embankment weeks before.
His motorcycle struck the exposed ditch.
And Emily Hart climbed down to help him.
Among Jack’s scattered belongings, she had found something that had been buried beneath mud and stones for sixteen years.
Her father’s pendant.
The room became perfectly still.
Emily stared at the joined necklace.
“No.”
Jack nodded.
“You didn’t just stop at the same place your father died, Emily. You picked up the one thing we spent sixteen years searching for.”
Emily sank slowly into the chair.
The coincidence was impossible.
And yet the necklace sat directly in front of her.
Two halves.
One belonging to her mother.
One to the father she had been told abandoned her.
Joined again because Emily had stopped beside the road.
Tears slid down her cheeks.
Bear started crying too.
Quietly.
Almost angrily.
“I would have come,” he said.
Emily looked at him.
“To birthdays. Christmas. School plays. Whatever you wanted. I would have come.”
His voice shattered.
“If I’d known you existed, kid, you would never have spent one graduation wondering whether anybody was going to show up.”
Emily crossed the room.
Bear stood uncertainly.
Emily hugged him.
The old man folded around her as if holding something he had spent half his life grieving without knowing its name.
Martin arrived at home after eleven.
Emily was waiting in the living room.
So were Jack and Bear.
Martin stopped immediately.
“What is this?”
Emily sat on the sofa.
Her graduation gown was gone.
She wore jeans and an old T-shirt.
The completed pendant rested against her chest.
Martin saw it.
