At home, Daniel tried to help.

He tried so hard. I see that now.

“Why don’t we go dancing on Friday?” he said one night at dinner. “There’s that place downtown. The one with the big band on the weekends. We haven’t been in years.”

“My knee hurts,” I said.

“Then we can just listen to music. At home. I’ll make popcorn.”

“I’m tired, Daniel.”

He put his fork down.

“Margaret,” he said. “You haven’t played a single song in weeks. Do you know that? There’s no music in this house anymore. There’s always been music in this house.”

I looked at the radio on the kitchen counter. He was right. It was silent. I didn’t even remember turning it off.

“I don’t feel like it,” I said.

Three years after Ivy left, I closed the studio.

I sold the equipment to a woman who was opening a studio in the next town. I gave the mirrors to a high school drama department. I took down the crooked blue sign myself and put it in the garage.

Daniel helped me move everything out. He didn’t say anything the whole time. But on the last day, when the studio was empty and the wooden floor was bare and the light was coming in through the front windows, he stopped in the middle of the room.

“You love teaching,” he said.

“Loved,” I said. “Past tense.”

“Your knee isn’t that bad anymore. You could still teach. You’re the best teacher I’ve ever seen.”

“Maybe I’m just finished,” I said.

He studied me for a long time.

Then he asked me a question I couldn’t answer for eighteen years.

“Are you finished with dancing, Maggie?” he said quietly. “Or are you just afraid to love something you might lose?”

I stood there in that empty studio.

“Every time I teach a child,” I whispered finally, “I remember Ivy. Every single time. Every little girl who asks me What if I fall. And every time, I have to lose her all over again. I can’t keep doing it, Daniel. I can’t.”

He put his arms around me.

He didn’t say anything else.

There wasn’t anything else to say.

I packed my competition photographs into boxes. I took them down from the hallway walls at home. Me and Theo, doing a lift in Atlanta. Me in a red dress at the national championship in Las Vegas. Me onstage in New York, in the spotlight, with my arms in the air.

I put them all in cardboard boxes and stored them in the attic.

I went looking for my wooden box.

It was a small box, about the size of a shoebox. Dark wood, cherry, with a brass latch. My father had made it for me when I was sixteen, when I won my first real competition. He’d carved my initials on the lid. M.E. Margaret Ellen.

Every medal I’d ever won was in that box. Every one. From that first little bronze when I was nine years old to my national championship gold. Twenty-six years of medals.

It had always sat on the shelf in the upstairs hallway. Right outside the yellow room.

I hadn’t opened it in years. I’d stopped looking at those medals after my knee. They made me sad.

But when I went to put it in the attic with the photographs, it wasn’t there.

I looked everywhere.

The hallway closet. Under the bed. The garage. The basement. The attic. I went back to the empty studio and looked in every corner. I called the woman who’d bought my equipment and asked if a wooden box had accidentally gotten mixed in.

It hadn’t.

“I must have misplaced it during the studio move,” I told Daniel. “I must have put it in one of the studio boxes by mistake. Or it got thrown out.”

“We’ll find it,” Daniel said.

We didn’t.

Eventually, I stopped looking.

Years passed.

Fifteen of them.

I got a part-time job at the library. Shelving books. Quiet work. No music. I worked there for twelve years. I liked it fine.

Daniel retired from his accounting firm. He took up woodworking in the garage, like my father used to. He made birdhouses. Dozens of them. He gave them to everyone we knew.

We went on a few trips. Arizona. Maine. We were happy enough. We had a good marriage. We loved each other.

But there was no music in our house.

And the door to the yellow room stayed closed.

Eventually, I stopped expecting either Ivy or my old life to ever come back.

Until that Sunday.

“Ivy?” I whispered.

The young woman on my porch nodded. She was already crying.

I pulled her into my arms.

Right there on the porch, with the door wide open and the dish towel on the floor at my feet. I didn’t even think about it. I just grabbed her and held on.

She was taller than me now. I had to reach up. Her gray wool coat smelled like cold air and coffee.

“Oh, sweetheart,” I said. “Oh, sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d recognize me,” she said into my shoulder.

“Are you kidding?” I pulled back and held her face in both my hands. “Look at you! Look at you!”

She was beautiful. She was a grown woman. Her hair was long now, past her shoulders. There were tiny gold earrings in her ears. She had a little scar on her chin I didn’t recognize.

But the eyes were the same. And that crooked smile.

“Margaret?” Daniel’s voice came from behind me in the hallway. “Who’s at the door? Is it those solar panel people again? I told them…”

He came around the corner. He stopped.

He stood there in the hallway in his reading glasses and his old cardigan sweater, holding the Sunday newspaper.

“Ivy?” he said.

“Hi, Daniel,” she said.

He dropped the newspaper.

He walked across the hallway in about three steps and pulled her into a hug. He held her for a long time. He’s not a hugger, Daniel. But he held on to her like she might disappear.

When he finally let go, he stepped back and looked her up and down.

“Well,” he said. His voice was rough. “You’ve certainly gotten taller.”

She laughed through her tears.

It was the same laugh. The hiccup laugh. The one that sounded like something that had been stuck inside her for a long time.

We brought her inside.

She stood in the front hallway for a moment and looked around. At the coat rack. At the stairs. At the shelf in the upstairs hallway where my wooden box used to sit.

Then she walked into the kitchen.

She stopped next to the kitchen table.

“You still have that table,” she said.

It was the same table. Old oak, scratched, with a burn mark on one corner from when Daniel put a hot pot down on it in 1997.

“Daniel refuses to replace it,” I said.

“It’s a perfectly good table,” Daniel protested.

Ivy reached out and touched one of the chairs. The one on the left side. By the window.

“I used to sit here,” she said quietly. “And draw.”

“And complain about vegetables,” I said.

She laughed again.

“Some things haven’t changed,” she said.

I made coffee. My hands were shaking so badly I spilled the grounds all over the counter. Daniel cleaned them up without saying anything.

We sat down at the old oak table. The three of us. Ivy in her chair by the window.

For a while, none of us knew what to say.

“So,” Daniel said finally. “Where do you live now?”

“In Columbus,” she said. “My own apartment. A little one. Over a coffee shop.”

“And your aunt?” I asked carefully. “Rhonda?”

Ivy was quiet for a moment.

“She’s in Arizona now,” she said. “We moved around a lot. Indiana. Then Kentucky. Then Texas for a while. Then Arizona. She tried, Margaret. She really did. She just… didn’t have a lot. Of anything.” She looked down at her coffee. “But I finished school. High school. And then two years of community college.”

I reached across the table and put my hand on hers.

“I’m proud of you,” I whispered.

She looked down at our hands.

But every few minutes, I noticed she was touching the inside pocket of her coat.

She hadn’t taken her coat off. She’d been sitting at our kitchen table for twenty minutes in her gray wool coat, buttoned all the way up.

And every few minutes, her hand would go to the inside of it. Right over her heart. Touching something. Like she was making sure it was still there.

Finally, I asked.

“Ivy,” I said. “Is something wrong, sweetheart?”

“No,” she said quickly.

“Do you need help? Are you in trouble? You can tell us. Whatever it is.”

She shook her head.

Then she took a deep breath.

“Actually,” she said, “there’s a reason I came.”

She stood up from the table.

She unbuttoned her gray wool coat. She reached into the inside pocket. A big pocket. Deeper than it should have been. Like she’d had it made that way.

She pulled out a wooden box.

I recognized it immediately.

Dark wood. Cherry. A brass latch. The initials carved on the lid.

M.E.

My father’s box.

“I haven’t seen that,” I whispered, “in years.”

I couldn’t move. I sat there staring at it.

Ivy placed the box on the kitchen table in front of me. Very carefully. With both hands.

“I took it,” she said quietly. “The night before I left.”

I stared at her.

“How?” I said. “Ivy, how? Where did you…”

“It was on the shelf,” she said. “In the hallway. Right outside my room. I walked past it every night. I’d seen you take it down once and open it and show me what was inside.”

She sat back down. She wrapped her hands around her coffee mug.

“The night before I left,” she said, “after you tucked me in, I waited until I heard you and Daniel go to sleep. Then I got out of bed and went into the hallway and took it off the shelf. And I put it in my duffel bag. At the very bottom. Under all my clothes. I was so scared you’d find it before I left. I didn’t sleep all night.”

Daniel leaned forward across the table.

“You took it?” he said. “Ivy. Why?”

Ivy looked down at the box.

“Because I thought,” she said slowly, “that if I kept something important from this house… I’d always have a reason to come back.”

Her voice started to tremble.

“I was eight,” she said. “I thought it was a good plan. I thought, if I have Margaret’s special box, then someday I’ll have to bring it back. And then I’ll get to come back here. To this house. To this kitchen.”

She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand.

“Then I got older,” she said. “And I realized what I’d actually done. I’d stolen it. From the only people who ever…”

She stopped.

“I was so ashamed,” she said. “I was so ashamed, Margaret.”

“Oh, Ivy,” I said.

“I kept promising myself I’d return it,” she said. “Every year. Every birthday. Every time we moved. I kept it with me. In every apartment. In every town. It was always the first thing I unpacked. And every year I’d say, This is the year I’ll find them. This is the year I’ll bring it back.”

She pushed the box across the table toward me.

“I think it belongs to you,” she said.

I looked at the box.

I put my hands on it. The wood was smooth and warm, like she’d been holding it for a long time.

I slowly lifted the brass latch.

I opened the lid.

And suddenly, I remembered everything that happened after she left.

All of it. All at once.

Inside the box lay dozens of medals.

Gold. Silver. Bronze.

Some on ribbons. Some on little chains. Some just loose, rattling around in the bottom of the box. My first little bronze medal, from when I was nine years old, from the regional tap competition in Dayton. The ribbon had faded from red to pink.

Awards from competitions I’d almost completely forgotten. Columbus. Cleveland. Indianapolis. Atlanta. Las Vegas.

“Oh, my goodness,” I whispered.