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Aiden?” she whispered.
    Examining the carving this closely, she realized that the square wasn’t simply a series of lines etched into the stone. It looked almost as if the square was a separate box that had been chiseled to fit perfectly inside the stone back of the bench, like a drawer. Or a door.
    But if it were a door, how would it open?
    She slipped her fingers into the opening and pulled. Though her overly excited inner child had hoped the rock would spring out to reveal all her grandmother’s secrets, she wasn’t really surprised when it didn’t.
    The expectation had been silly, fueled by one too many movies, one too many fantasy stories that she’d read.
    Next time she came here, she’d remember to bring something to pry at the stone. A screwdriver, perhaps. It certainly wasn’t as if she could have a locksmith come make a new key for it.
    The heart is the key. Follow your heart.
    She looked down at the smooth stone heart in her hand, a flutter of doubt speeding her pulse.
    Surely it couldn’t be as simple as that. Could it?
    Her fingers trembled from excitement as she lifted the stone toward the opening. With her imagination already working overtime, she could almost swear that the smooth stone began to vibrate against her skin. The thought was ridiculous. Impossible. And yet the stone did feel warmer than it had only seconds before.
    A nervous giggle spilled over her lips as she fit the stone into the opening and waited.
    And waited some more.
    “What an idiot,” she muttered at last, chuckling at her own gullible expectations that something wonderful would happen when she put the stone into the hole. “I hope you’re having a good laugh up there, Nana E,” she said, glancing toward the sky.
    Somehow this all had to fit together, if she were only clever enough to figure it out. Maybe she was missing something.
    Once again, she studied the carving. “There must be a meaning of some sort,” she said, tracing her finger first over the A on the left side of the square and then the E on the right side. She sat back and squinted at the carving, trying for some perspective. “A, heart, E,” she said aloud, reading the markings as they appeared with the stone in place.
    The only halfway clever thing she could make from that was the obvious: Aiden loves Ellen. It was like something kids would come up with in high school.
    What if she turned the stone around so that it would read A, little heart, E?
    Still not anything that made sense to her. But if it didn’t mean anything, why did someone bother to carve both sides and make them different? Was the carver just practicing his craft?
    She sighed, running her hands over her face. Either the frustration or the ponytail was giving her a headache. She pulled the elastic band from her hair and scrubbed her fingers against her scalp. When was the last time she’d had a drink of water? Dehydration headache, maybe? She reached for the bottle she’d brought along with her, and tilted it to her mouth for a nice, long drink.
    Maybe it had nothing to do with how the letters and the symbol read. Maybe she was being too literal and the meaning was more abstract. Maybe it had something to do with the overall picture.
    One heart was big and one small. How else could she interpret that? One heart appeared far away and one close-up. Okay, if the carvings were somehow related to her grandmother’s situation, maybe there was a way to rationalize their meaning. Maybe that was how her grandmother might have felt about a lost love. Ellen was here and her Aiden was far away.
    But why carve their initials on the square, Aiden on one side, Ellen on the other, separated by…what? A hole? And why make each side of the stone different?
    “Suppose I put this in the other way around,” she mused, slipping the heart out of its space. Maybe seeing it the other way would trigger some brainstorm that had so far eluded her.
    As before, the stone felt warm in her hand, tingling against her