Mom and Aunt Sophia refused to talk to each other after that.

They kept searching Pappou’s house, but the necklace wasn’t found. Of course it wasn’t—it was in a shoebox in my closet. Every day, a thousand hundred times a day, I thought about telling them where it was, but I was even more scared than I was before. I’d get in so much trouble now. They’d be mad for taking it, but they’d be even madder when they found out I’d lied to their faces and caused this terrible war.

Soon enough, they’d forget about it, I told myself. Christmas would come, Easter would come, we’d get together to laugh and eat, and the necklace would be forgotten. Maybe they’d even laugh about it one day.

Maybe.

A couple of days later, I casually asked my mother what she’d do if the necklace turned up. Just to see what she said. Maybe if I confessed now, it would all blow over.

“It’s not about the necklace anymore,” Mom said in an icy tone. “You don’t do that. Not to your sister. I don’t want anything to do with her. That’s it.”

Everyone tried to make peace between Aunt Soph and my mom, but nothing worked.

“What will we do at Uncle D’s wedding?” I asked, even though it wasn’t until next summer.

“You’ll stay right next to me,” Mom said coldly. “And don’t sit with her at Greek school, either.”

I didn’t like telling her that wasn’t even an option any more. Eleni sat with Anastasia at Greek school now.

That Sunday, Dad watched soccer alone. Nicos and Kat moped around the house grumpier than usual, and that’s saying something because teenagers are grumpy all the time. They frowned a lot, mumbled one-word answers, and stomped up the stairs, which was normal, but that day they did it with the volume turned up.

Mom was in her room and I went in to see if she was OK. After Yiayia died, Mom kept Yiayia’s bathrobe, which she didn’t ever wear, but I caught her with her face buried in it, sobbing so deeply that her whole body was heaving. I thought she was trying to suffocate herself in it, so I watched, terrified. My mom had turned into someone I didn’t know, and now she was trying to kill herself with a bathrobe.

When she realized I was there, her giant sobs slowed into gulps. It stopped sounding as if she was desperate for oxygen and more like she had bad indigestion. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, held out the bathrobe, and said, “Smell.”

Even though I thought she was being super weird and scary, I smelled the bathrobe and Yiayia flooded over me in a giant wave. The sudden memory of her made my eyes sting. It smelled warm and safe and kind. I bit my lip because it started wobbling, but I couldn’t stop my face from wrinkling. Mom nodded, her eyes puffy and her nose running.

“I know,” she said. “Say goodbye. I’m putting it back.”

I wanted to but I couldn’t. Say goodbye to what? The smell? The bathrobe? It wasn’t to Yiayia, because she wasn’t there. Mom wrapped it up and returned it to the top shelf of her closet. She blew her nose on some toilet paper she had by her bed, threw the roll to me, and once I’d blown mine, she came over and pulled me toward her for a hug that went on for ages.

That night in bed, I thought about how weird it was that people’s smells stay in the world when they’ve gone. I wonder if Yiayia’s smell will eventually fade from her bathrobe or whether it’ll still be there in a hundred years. Maybe the world is full of the smells of people who aren’t here anymore and we just don’t know it. Maybe that’s what makes us feel sad for no apparent reason sometimes. I don’t know.

All through the semester, I was bored, bored, bored. I usually spent every holiday with Eleni, but that was before. I wrote in my notebook most of that week because I had nothing else to do, and the only person I could talk to was a piece of paper. Which is not even a person.

Hello, piece of paper.

Hello, Lexie.

How are you, piece of paper?

I’m flat and white, thank you. How are you?

I’m bored out of my head and talking to my notebook, which is just sad.

I’ll cheer you up. Did you know the Sami people have a specific word for a reindeer whose “hair near its nostrils is a different color from what one would expect in relation to the color of the rest of its hair?”

Lovely, piece of paper, that would have made me happy once, but now I don’t even care.

The first day back after the October break, Eleni didn’t show up at school. She hadn’t told me she wasn’t coming—not with her mouth and not in whale song, either.

But when she didn’t appear, the teacher announced that she’d moved to the school on the other side of town. The one Anastasia went to.

Everyone spun around to look at me, gasping and whispering. I felt raw and open, like my insides were on view for all to see. Despite twenty-seven other kids being in the room, I had never been more alone.

When I went to sit on the playground that break, the circle of space around me felt as deep and wide as the universe.

I pretended I didn’t care and everything was fine, but my heart was the one that needed surgery now.