I stared at him.
“I never knew that.”
Dad nodded.
“She bought it from a furniture maker and paid for it little by little. A quarter a week, for two years.”
He ran his thumb over the old pencil markings.
“Your grandmother brushed her hair in front of this mirror for decades. Then she brushed mine. And yours.”
Tears filled my eyes.
I’d thought I knew the mirror’s history.
But it had belonged to even more generations of our family than I’d realized.
“Did Brian know that?” I asked.
“Some of it. You told him.”
He was right.
During our first Christmas together, I’d told Brian all about Grandma Lena.
The mirror.
The hundred brushstrokes.
The summer after my mother died.
He’d held my hand and called the story beautiful.
Now, years later, he’d destroyed the very thing I’d trusted him to understand.
