For twelve years, the whole school called her "Trash Girl" because her mother collected cans for a living — until graduation night, when she said one sentence into the microphone and four hundred people rose to their feet in tears.

In ninth grade, she stopped me after class and held up a book of photographs.

Old Japanese work coats, patched and patched again, with bold white stitches across indigo cloth.

"Visible mending," she said. "They didn't hide the repair. They sewed it in thread that shows. A mend is how you know something was valued enough to keep."

I stared at the page.

"Molly, I'm not telling you this to be kind," she said. "I'm telling you because it's true."

I didn't say anything.

I just went to the bathroom and cried in the last stall, with my hand pressed flat against that red-stitched sleeve.

And that same spring I found the notebook.

I need to go back a few years first, to a night when I was ten.

My mother came home at eleven o'clock, much later than usual, with her boots caked in dust and no money for dinner.