Kayla and I are careful with each other now, which is honest, and better than fake. She came to me in the fall — herself, no lawyers, no Michael — and told me the part that wasn’t in any settlement: she took the box during the funeral week on an impulse she still can’t explain, meaning to copy a few recipes and return it, and then the returning got harder every month it didn’t happen, and then the little lie needed a bigger lie to live in, and one day she woke up with a blog, a book, and a dead woman’s handwriting in her attic like a stolen saint. I believe her. Small thefts grow into biographies; I’ve watched it happen in better families than ours. She does the dishes at Sunday dinner now, every week, unasked, which in the Novak language is a formal apology renewed weekly, and I have started — slowly, at my counter, hand to hand — teaching her granddaughter-in-law the real versions. All of them. Corrections included. Because here is the wisdom my mother’s green tin finally taught me, forty years after she rigged it: secrets are only insurance while you’re alive to be the vault. Write your people down. Credit your dead. Say out loud, at the table, with witnesses, WHOSE pie it is — because the ribbon fades and the tin rusts, but a name on a recipe outlives everybody at the fair. First prize, by the way, went to neither of us. It went to a fifteen-year-old with a strawberry-rhubarb and no idea what she’d witnessed. Mama would have died laughing all over again.