Across town, Daniel Brooks had no idea that he was approaching the single most important object he would find that year. He was thirty-eight, wore an old canvas jacket with a frayed cuff, and carried a paper sack containing sandpaper, brass screws, and a small container of wood filler. He had spent the morning repairing an antique dining table in the workshop attached to his little wooden house. Now he was walking home after discovering that the hardware store had sold him screws a fraction too short for the job.
Daniel noticed the wallet because it lay at an awkward angle beside the curb, half sheltered beneath a parked delivery truck. A thin strip of leather protruded from a tangle of wet paper and fallen leaves. He might have passed it if he had been hurrying, but he was not, and years spent working with damaged furniture had trained his eyes to notice unusual shapes. He picked it up, stepped away from traffic, and opened it far enough to find identification. The first thing he saw was a thick bundle of bills secured by a paper band.
"Well," he murmured, looking around the street. "Somebody's having a very bad day."
He carried it beneath the awning of a closed stationery shop and examined it without removing anything. There was a driver's license identifying Victoria Sterling, a passport, an expensive black card, and a business card embossed in gold. The name meant something to him because he had seen it on delivery vans and showroom advertisements, though he could not have identified Victoria from a photograph before that afternoon. He flipped the card over and found an office number and a website. Then he noticed the small inside pocket, slightly open, and the edge of a faded picture.
The picture showed a woman standing beside a man and a little girl, all three of them laughing at something beyond the frame. The girl held a paintbrush nearly as long as her forearm, and the woman wore a small silver ring with a pale blue stone. Daniel recognized the ring because the real thing sat immediately behind the photograph, wrapped in a square of soft cloth. He stopped looking at the money. He thought about Claire.
Claire Brooks had been dead for five years, but Daniel still caught himself remembering things he wanted to tell her. A peculiar hinge, the smell of the first rain after a dry week, a neighbor's child learning to ride a bicycle: he would turn with a sentence ready and find only empty air. She had possessed a talent for seeing beauty in things other people had abandoned. Their shared workshop had once been full of half-finished chairs and her laughter, and after she died, he had spent months unable to enter the room without feeling as though its walls had moved closer together.