The music box had sat on Grandma Rosa's dresser for as long as Daniela could remember. It was made of dark wood with a rose carved into the lid. When you opened it, a tiny metal cylinder turned and played a melody—soft, slow, and a little sad.

"What song is that?" Daniela had asked when she was six.

"It is a song from my village in Mexico," Grandma Rosa said. "My mother sang it when I was your age. She gave me this box the day I left for the United States. She said, 'Wherever this song plays, that is where home is.'"

Daniela did not fully understand then. Home was here—the yellow house on Maple Street with the squeaky screen door and the smell of cinnamon in the kitchen.

Grandma Rosa passed away the winter Daniela turned thirteen. The family gathered to sort through her things. Daniela's mother held up the music box. "She wanted you to have this," she said.

Daniela took the box to her room and opened the lid. The melody filled the air, each note clear and fragile as glass. She closed her eyes and saw Grandma Rosa's hands—wrinkled and warm—turning the pages of old photo albums, kneading dough for tortillas, pressing flowers into books.

Daniela realized the music box was more than an object. It was a thread connecting three generations. Her great-grandmother had listened to this same melody in a small village thousands of miles away. Her grandmother had carried it across a border and into a new life. Now it sat in Daniela's room, still playing, still holding a piece of every person who had loved it.

She wound the key and listened again. The song was not sad, she decided. It was something deeper—proof that love does not disappear. It just changes form.