Because there, folded into the tiny space behind the false back, was a second photograph, and when I eased it out, my heart broke open all at once.
It was me. A baby, only weeks old, my whole life still ahead of me.
My mother had worn her own photograph in the front of that locket, the one I looked at whenever I missed her, but hidden behind it, facing inward against her heart, she had kept a picture of me as a baby, so that every single day of her life, without anyone knowing, she carried my face pressed to her chest.
Look after what is inside, she told me at the very end, and I thought she meant her photograph. She did not. She meant us. The two of us, mother and child, hidden together in a little gold locket, held over her heart for a lifetime and now over mine.
There was a note too, folded smaller than a stamp, in her hand.
My darling, it read, you were against my heart before you were ever in my arms, and you have been there every day since, whether you knew it or not. Wear us both now. We were always together in here.
I lowered myself onto the edge of the bed and I wept, twenty-eight years of missing her and never knowing that all that time, I had been carrying the proof of how she loved me, right against my own heart, exactly where she carried me against hers.
Every day I opened that locket to look at her face, and behind it, an inch away, was my own baby face, the two of us together, and I never knew.
I understand her better now, all of it. The way she would touch the locket at her collar sometimes, absent, in the middle of a hard day, and go a little calmer. She was not touching gold. She was touching me, her child, kept close where nothing in the world could take me from her. I did the same thing for years without ever knowing what I was really reaching for.
I have put both photographs where they belong now, hers in front and mine behind, facing each other in the dark the way she always kept them. Mother and child, together, over my heart.
When my own daughter is grown, I will give her the locket, and I will show her the false back, and I will put a picture of her, as a baby, behind mine. So that the women of our family go on carrying each other against their hearts, the way my mother taught me, in the quietest, most secret way there is.
Look after what is inside, she said. I do now, Mama. I finally understand. It was always us.