Summary

Cecelia gets a package three days before school starts and opens the box to reveal a pink, silky pouch, knowing immediately what is inside. Her mother’s pearls are smooth and cool to the touch, and she sits there in a stupor until the box slides to the floor from her lap and a note falls out. Her father wrote simply that he thought she should have them. She fingers a pearl, remembering how her mother had once told her the story of how they were created. She said that each had a flaw of some kind because in nature nothing was truly perfect but she doesn’t believe that because Cecelia was her perfect pearl.

Later, Cecelia and Tallulah go out to buy a rake and a bulb planter and then Tallulah takes Cecelia to the house they’d saved from a...