Tess and I took the morning train to Bellweather. I resented Peter for sending us into a conversation he had avoided, but I resented the unopened locker more. Colin waited beneath the station clock holding a canvas parcel. He looked so much like Peter that my body leaned toward him before my mind could object. He said Peter had visited to apologize, not to settle the old inheritance. They spent one afternoon drinking coffee and sorting their mother's sewing basket.

The locker held the quilt's missing border, cut from their mother's blue housecoat, and a box of cassette tapes. Peter had believed I threw the tapes away during our last move. I had believed Colin took them. Neither was true. Their mother had stored them at the station when she moved into assisted living, then forgotten to give anyone the claim slip. The brothers' long argument had grown around an object sitting fifteen miles from both of them.

Colin played one tape on a battery recorder from the station office. Their mother was singing while dishes clattered in the background. Halfway through, Peter's teenage voice complained that Colin had borrowed his coat. Colin closed his eyes. I understood that the tapes could prove where an object had gone, but not why two brothers chose suspicion year after year. That repair would require more than retrieval.

Colin asked whether he could help finish the quilt. My first impulse was no. Peter's secrecy had made every discovery feel like territory I needed to defend. Then I remembered his recorded warning not to turn the project into a perfect last message. We carried the parcel home together. At the window seat, Colin opened the sewing tin and found one final blue-threaded strip beneath the thimbles. It bore no instruction, only four names: Peter, Colin, Tess, and mine, with enough blank fabric left for several more.