The charm she had given me was the one that was supposed to be in the casket with her mother. It took us a few hours of crying and talking to piece together what must have happened during those frantic, blurry days of the funeral. In her grief, Maya had grabbed the wrong half from her mother’s nightstand, thinking it was her own.
She had spent two years mourning a physical connection that she believed was the “surviving” half. But the truth was even more complicated.
“She kept them both in that box,” Elias said, pointing to the wooden chest. “When she passed, I thought I put the right one in her hand, but I was so out of it, Maya. I didn’t realize there were two different sets.” This meant that the piece Maya had given me wasn’t just a random scrap of metal. It was the original piece her mother had worn when Maya was a baby, a piece Sarah had kept because she couldn’t let go of the memory.
The “half” I had been wearing wasn’t just a symbol of Maya’s grief; it was a relic of Sarah’s own inability to let go. Maya took the two pieces from the attic and the one from my neck and laid them out on the floor. There were three halves now. Two that fit together perfectly from the replacement set, and the one lone, original half that Sarah had cherished. Maya looked at the three pieces and then looked at me, a strange, knowing smile touching her lips.
“I think I know why I gave you that one,” Maya said softly. She didn’t ask for it back. Instead, she took the two matching halves and put them back in the wooden box. She told me she wanted me to keep the original one, the one that had no match anymore. She said that since I was the one who helped her find a way to live again, I deserved the piece that represented starting over.
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