I stared at her.
“Under it?”
She nodded.
We laid the sweater on the kitchen table.
At first, I saw nothing unusual.
Then I ran my fingers around the edge of the embroidered sunflower.
One section lifted slightly.
There was a tiny hidden pocket sewn beneath it.
My breath caught.
I slipped two fingers inside.
Something hard was tucked into the fabric.Father-child activities
I pulled it out.
And the room disappeared around me.
It was a small wooden sunflower.
Simple.
Hand-carved.
One petal slightly larger than the others.
A tiny crack along the stem.
Our father had made it.
He carved one for each of us when we were children.
Mine had been a little wooden moon.
Laura’s was the sunflower.
She carried it everywhere for years.
And the night she disappeared, it disappeared with her.
I sat down.
Sophie stood beside me silently.
For nearly forty years, I had wondered whether Laura had walked out of our lives carrying that little sunflower.
