All he asked for was a picture of them together and the button, both found on her bedside table.

‘And that's all you want?’ His parents asked.

 He nodded. A whole house of things and all he wanted was a picture and a button.

‘As long as you're sure,’ his dad said as he took another empty box to the living room. His mum patted him on the head and smiled, ‘I think it’s a nice choice.’ She kissed his forehead and went to help pack things into the boxes, leaving him sat on the floor of his grandmother's bedroom.

 He wanted the picture for a simple reason, so he could see her, happy, smiling, holding him to her chest. He put the photograph in his rucksack and looked at the button sitting in his palm.

She had been lying in her bed and he was sat on the edge of it, looking through the little trinket box she kept on her bedside table. He picked out each item and she explained what it was: one odd earing of her favourite pair, a spare key for the backdoor, a tiny photograph of his father and aunty when they were very small. He found the button at the very bottom, pushing itself into the corner of the box.

‘That's my lucky button,’ she said with a smile.

He asked why it was lucky, why not have something bigger to bring more luck. That made her laugh. ‘It was my mother's. It belonged to her favourite dress, the one she was buried in.’ That made him feel weird, he didn’t like to hear about people dying. But his grandmother was smiling still, looking at it fondly.

‘So why is it lucky? Was she lucky?’ he asked her. She laughed again, only quieter, and slowly shook her head. ‘Not really, but she was a lovely spirit.’ He didn’t really understand. ‘When my mother died, my brother and my sisters and my aunts each put something in her casket, something they had an exact copy of. My sisters found a necklace and a bracelet, one of my aunts had a pair of small crystals. My brother put in a little teddy bear. They said that we would always be connected to her that way. I didn't really have anything that reminded me of her so I decided to take one of the buttons on her favourite dress. She looked very pretty in it and I wanted to be reminded of how beautiful she was.’ She smiled down at him.

When she told him that, his grandmother had also looked very pretty. He decided then that one day, when she died, he would keep the lucky button and remember how beautiful and how lovely she was.