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The glass vial lived on a shelf in her bedroom, gathering dust alongside a blunt, misshapen origami crane and a taxidermy luna moth she regretted getting. It made her think of family vacations in Michigan, and walking home from the lake. There was a store, past the drawbridge and before the neat rows of periwinkle houses, with case after case of butterflies, each laid out with a metal pin through its heart. She would stop and stare at them, and sometimes trail her fingers near the glass, trying to decide whether they were real.

The vial was a gift from her father. After giving it to her, he picked it up and began to work the cork out carefully. His face changed when he concentrated: his forehead wrinkled and his eyes got narrow and his lips got thin, the tip or the side of his tongue slightly visible between them. She liked to make a secret out of watching him when he worked in the garage, sweating in the muggy July heat that lingered after dark and worsened when it drizzled. He skinned deer out there, and drank beer, and once broke her clandestine notions by calling her in and showing her a small square paper from his pocket before folding it into a crane that he pressed into her hand.

With the cork worked out, he tilted the vial sideways and pressed the nugget into her hand, too. It was heavier than she expected, and rough, and she couldn’t hold on to the word he used to describe it. His hands were so much bigger than hers, with rough callouses at the tops of his palms. There was always a new scrape or a scab to be found on one of his fingers, or else the bump of a fresh pink, shiny scar. He told her gold was soft, even if it didn’t feel like it, and they weren’t supposed to touch the nugget with their bare hands. With a little wink, he added that just once was probably okay.

One summer she had run around the garden, trying to catch butterflies in her closed, cupped hands. It was hard to figure out how to look at them after catching them without letting them get away. Sometimes she pinched one wing between her fingers and watched them wriggling, trying to escape. When her brother saw, he scolded her for this, grasping a wrist and holding it out to the light in accusation. She had struggled to escape his grasp, pulling, heels dug into the grass for leverage, her voice a high whine as she told him to let go. Eventually he had, and she had tumbled and fallen and cried so loud that their father stuck his head out from the garage, wiping his forehead with the back of his hand. He had washed her scraped knee and told her about butterfly wings; the next day they walked into town — past the display store and the drawbridge — and he had bought her a net.

Sliding the nugget back into the vial, she watched her father cork it and place it on the shelf, and she thought about it being small and heavy and soft. She wasn’t supposed to touch it, but there was no proof she ever had. It wasn’t like the time when, after she’d gotten her net, she caught one of the big, yellow and black butterflies in her hands. Careful not to let anyone see, she had run around to the side of the house and crouched, feeling it flutter against her. When she finally opened them, she saw it had stained her fingers gold.