I barely spoke.

Some days, I hardly ate.

But every morning, Grandma brushed my hair.

She didn’t tell me to stop crying.

She didn’t insist everything happened for a reason.

She simply stood behind me, counted to one hundred, and let me grieve.

Eleven years before my divorce, Grandma Lena died.

My father gave me the mirror.

“She would have wanted you to have it,” he said. “You were always the one standing in front of it.”

I owned only a few things that had belonged to her.

A quilt.

A recipe box.

Her reading glasses.

And that mirror.

Yet for some reason, it became the one possession Brian fought hardest to keep during our divorce.

***

The strange part was that Brian had never liked it.

When I first hung the mirror in our living room, he called it old-fashioned.

When his parents visited for Christmas, he asked me to take it down because his mother thought it looked outdated.