Chapter 2 - The Wooden CharmIn 1986, my twin sister Diane and I turned sixteen on the same July afternoon, six minutes apart, the way we had every year of our lives.
Our mother, Helen, had spent nearly three months knitting us matching birthday sweaters. Mine had a row of little white daisies across the chest. Diane's had one enormous sunflower, yellow and gold, taking up the entire front.
Partway through Diane's sweater, Helen had made a mistake — she'd grabbed the wrong skein of yarn and knit one whole petal in brown before she noticed. She'd offered, half-laughing, to rip it out and redo it.
Diane wouldn't hear of it.
"Leave it," she'd said, grinning at me over Mom's shoulder. "Now Margaret can't ever steal mine and pretend it's hers."
I'd thrown a carrot stick at her from across the table. She'd caught it out of the air without even looking.
That night, half our extended family crowded into our backyard for the celebration. Dad manned the grill, flipping burgers and telling the same three jokes he told every summer. Diane kept sneaking frosting off the birthday cake with her finger every time Mom's back was turned.
Everything was ordinary. Everything was exactly the way it was supposed to be.
Then, sometime around nine o'clock, Diane kissed Mom on the cheek and headed for the back door, sunflower sweater and all.
"Going to get some air," she called over her shoulder. "Save me another piece of cake."
Those were the last words I ever heard my sister say. For forty years.
She never came back through that door.
No suitcase went missing from her closet. No note turned up anywhere in the house. No phone call ever came, not that year, not the next, not any year after that.
The sunflower sweater disappeared right along with her.
My mother searched for Diane until the day she died — flyers, phone calls, private investigators we could barely afford. My father reacted in almost the opposite direction. Within a few months, he'd quietly stopped joining the search parties. He packed Diane's photographs into a box in the attic. Eventually, all it took to clear a room was someone saying her name out loud.
For forty years, I told myself grief had simply broken something in him, and that this was just his particular way of surviving it.
Dad was ninety now, living out his days at Oakwood Manor, twenty minutes from my house. His body had gone frail, but his mind was still sharp as a tack.
Until that afternoon in my kitchen, I had never once questioned his silence.
Then Chloe's small voice cut back through the memory.
"Grandma? Dolly said you should look inside."
I stared at her, still holding the sweater like it might dissolve in my hands. "Inside what?"
"Under the flower. There's a little hole."
She pointed to a nearly invisible seam tucked beneath the sunflower's center. I ran my thumb over it and felt where a thread had been deliberately loosened, not worn through by accident.
I slid two fingers inside the small opening.
Something hard brushed against my fingertip.
I pulled it free and nearly dropped it. A tiny wooden sunflower, no bigger than a thumbnail, carved smooth by hand and worn soft at the edges.
My knees actually buckled. I had to grab the counter.
When Diane and I were girls, our father used to carve little wooden flowers for us out of scraps from his workshop. Mine was a daisy, hers a sunflower — small, simple, meant for nothing more than a windowsill.
I had seen Diane's charm exactly once since childhood.
The night she disappeared. Clutched tight in my father's fist, under the yellow porch light, his knuckles white around it.
"Grandma, why are you crying?" Chloe whispered.
I closed my fingers around the charm until the edges bit into my palm. "Because your great-grandfather was holding this the night my sister disappeared."
Chloe frowned at the tiny wooden flower like it might explain itself. "Then how did Dolly get it?"
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"I don't know."
Those three words had run my entire life for four decades. I decided, standing in my kitchen with a broken plate at my feet, that I was done letting them.
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