The stranger set the box down between my red carnations and my untouched coffee.

It was small and blue. The cardboard kind, with a lid that fits over the top. One corner had gone soft and furry with age, the way cardboard does after it’s been handled for a long time.

“I made someone a promise,” he said. “No matter what happened, this had to reach you.”

His hands were shaking. So were mine. But mine had been shaking since 1963, so that was hardly news.

I looked up from the box at his face.

And I stopped breathing.

He had Benjamin’s blue eyes. Not just blue. That exact blue, like the deep end of a swimming pool. He had Benjamin’s crooked smile, the one that came up higher on the left side than the right. And he had that same small dimple in the middle of his chin. The one I used to touch with my thumb, when I was seventeen, like it was a button that turned him on and off.

It was as if the boy I’d loved had walked out of my memory and grown sixty years older without me.

“Who are you?” I asked.

Before he could answer, the bell over the door jangled.

My niece Wren came in fast. Her coat was half off one shoulder. Her car keys were still in her hand. She had the look of a woman who had planned something carefully and then panicked about it in the parking lot.

She saw us. She stopped.

I looked at her.

“You knew about this,” I said.

Wren came over and stood at the edge of the table. She didn’t sit down.

“Aunt Isobel,” she said. “I knew a man had found something that might belong to you.”

“Might.”

“I needed proof,” she said. “Before I put hope back in your hands.”

I pulled the box closer to me across the table. Both hands.

“I have carried my own hope for sixty-two years,” I said. “I did not need you deciding what day I was allowed to hold it.”

Wren’s face fell. She sat down slowly in the chair next to me.

“You’re right,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

The stranger lowered his eyes to the tabletop. He looked like a man who’d walked into the middle of a family argument and wished the floor would open up.

“Open it,” he said quietly. “Please, ma’am.”