I opened my copy of King Lear and found dry flowers still intact between the pages. No crumbling, no dust. Just paper-thin color resting on Cordelia's line: "I love your Majesty / According to my bond, no more nor less." When she was five, my daughter had picked them behind our coconut trees, salt wind in her hair. "For you, Papa," she said, and pressed them into my palm like a crown. I slid them into Dover's scene and closed the book, trusting paper more than memory. Years later, they remain. Lear kept Cordelia. I kept these.

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