Maya found the key in June, in the gap between the wall and the radiator where things go to be forgotten. It was brass, old, cut with an unusual pattern she didn't recognize.
She spent the summer trying it in everything: the garden shed, the lockbox under her parents' bed, the drawer in the study that no one could open. The key fit none of them.
She tried the neighbor's gate. She tried the mailbox at the end of the road, which everyone knew hadn't opened properly since before she was born. She tried the storage unit where her grandmother's things had gone. She tried the cabinet at the back of the hardware store that the owner kept locked and wouldn't explain.
Nothing. The key belonged to something she couldn't find.
In September, when school started again, she put the key on a piece of string and wore it around her neck. She didn't know why. It felt right to keep it close, this thing that didn't go anywhere.
Her mother asked once, years later, what the necklace was. Maya held the key up to the light, turned it over.
"I found it," she said. "I never found what it opens."
"What do you think it opens?"
Maya thought about it. "I don't know. Something good. Something that would make sense of it."
Her mother looked at the key for a long time.
"Maybe it doesn't open anything anymore," she said. "Maybe it used to, and now it doesn't."
Maya put the key back against her chest.
"That's worse," she said. "If it used to."
She wore it for the rest of her life.