My name is Hannah. I’m the housekeeper at the Whitcombe estate, and that morning I had brought my granddaughter Lily to work because her school was closed.

Judge Whitcombe was recovering in the gilded drawing room, his ankle in a black brace, the staff standing along the wall. He hadn’t smiled in eleven years. Nobody knew why.

Lily wandered across the marble floor the way six-year-olds do. She stopped in front of his chair and looked at his wrist, at a tiny silver star on a worn leather bracelet. She reached out and touched it.

‘That’s my mommy’s star,’ she said.

I ran to pull her back. The judge lifted his head slowly. He wasn’t angry. His eyes had filled, and his hand shook as it closed around hers.

‘Where did you see it?’ he asked.

‘On her necklace,’ Lily said. ‘It’s the same. Mommy says it’s for luck.’

Lily’s mother, my daughter Clara, had left home at nineteen after an argument and never told me why. She had raised Lily alone in another city. I had only just found them again.

‘Forty years ago,’ the judge said, ‘I had a daughter named Clara. Her mother took her and vanished. I searched for years.’

He opened a locked drawer in the small table beside him and took out a matching leather bracelet with a silver star.

I sat down on the floor of that grand room because my legs would not hold me. Clara had told me her father was dead. She had believed it.

It turned out that a lawyer had lied to both of us, twenty years before, to end a custody dispute. The judge had never stopped searching.

Clara came that same evening. She stood in the doorway of the drawing room for a long moment, and then she crossed the marble floor in three quick steps.

The judge smiled for the first time in eleven years. Lily climbed into his lap and asked him if he could fix the star on her mother’s necklace, because it was loose.

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