In the years after the war, my grandmother kept a tin box of buttons that no garment in the house could account for. She sorted them on Sunday afternoons by a logic only she understood—not by color or size, but by some private register of weight and history. When I asked what she was looking for, she would say only that a button remembers the coat. I took this for the harmless whimsy of an old woman until, clearing her house after the funeral, I found each button paired in a ledger with a name, a date, and a single line of description. She had not been sorting buttons at all; she had been keeping the dead.