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"Show me the sauce again, I've forgotten everything about it."

Gianna dragged me into the dining room, which had a table that seated twelve and was set for eleven, with a crayon-covered placemat at either end of it for Marco's kids, eight-year-old Luca and five-year-old Sofia, who had been introduced to me on the front porch and had immediately asked if I was famous now. (Luca: "You were on TV." Me: "I was." Luca: "You were crying." Me: "Correct." Sofia: "Do you know Auntie Cam?" Me: "Very well." Sofia: "She's really tall." Me: "She is." Sofia, solemnly: "I'm going to be tall." Me: "I believe in you.")

Gianna handed me a stack of plates and leaned in.

"Okay," she said, her voice comically low. "Real talk. Is she being weird?"

"Define weird."

"Like, weirder than normal. Twitchy. Patting her pockets." She looked over her shoulder toward the kitchen. "She's been patting her jacket pocket since you walked in. I counted. Eleven times."

I set down a plate very carefully.

Here's what I hadn't told anyone. Not Mia. Not Laine. Not my therapist, which was a first, because I tell my therapist everything now because it's literally what I pay her for.

Two weeks ago, the morning after the parade, I'd been digging through Cam's closet, looking for her RUSSO 4 jersey, the original, the one I'd claimed and she'd hidden because she claims I wear it "too often." It was not on the hanger where it used to live. It was not in the drawer. I'd gone all the way to the back, on my knees, behind her shoes, behind the box of old UConn sweatshirts, and I'd found a pair of black dress shoes she never wears.

There was a box in the left one.

It was dark blue velvet, about the size of a walnut, and I'd held it in my palm for a full ten seconds before my brain caught up with my hands.

I did not open it.

I want to be perfectly clear how hard that was, because it is the single most heroic act of self-control I have ever performed, and that includes the night I sat courtside and watched her play hurt and didn't cry. I held it. I felt the weight of it. I felt my heart stop and start again and stop again. And then I put it back in the shoe, and put the shoe back exactly where it was, at the exact angle it had been sitting, because I am an insurance claims specialist and I know how to document a scene.

Then I sat on her closet floor and cried for twenty minutes and had to tell her I'd been chopping onions.

She'd looked at me. "We don't have any onions."

"I was mentally chopping them."

She'd let it go. Mostly.

Three days later, the box wasn't in the shoe anymore.

I knew, because I checked. I know. I'm aware. My therapist would have a lot to say about it if I told her, which I should.

And I didn't have to look very hard to figure out where it had gone. Because ever since that morning, every time Cam hugged me, I'd felt a hard little square pressed against my ribs from the inside pocket of her jacket. And every time she took the jacket off, she draped it over the nearest chair and then glanced at it every few minutes like it might get up and walk away. And at airport security yesterday, she'd held her jacket in her arms and refused to put it in the gray bin until the TSA agent had asked her twice, and then she'd watched it go through the X-ray machine like it was her firstborn child.

She was carrying it everywhere.

She had been carrying it everywhere for eleven days.

And she had no idea that I knew.

"Harper," Gianna said slowly. "Your face is doing a lot right now."

"My face is not doing a lot."

"It's doing so much." Gianna's eyes went enormous. Then, she looked at the kitchen. Then she looked back at me, and she covered her mouth with both hands. "Oh my God."

"No. Nothing. There's no God in this equation. Set the table."

"Oh my God."

"Gianna."

"Is she..."