I was 29 when I booked a birthday trip to Puerto Rico. Thirty was coming fast, and I'd spent two years doing the quiet, unglamorous work of reconnecting with myself — my roots, my history, the parts of me I'd set aside to survive.

I followed incense into a bead shop I hadn't planned to enter. The shop madre asked if I'd like my selections made into a necklace. That question cracked something open.

Standing at that counter, watching her hands work, I was pulled back to my grandmother knitting blankets for me in winter. To the occasions when my mom's "good" jewelry came out — each piece a story, a transfer of something unspoken. Those handmade things were how the women in my family said: you matter. You are held. You belong to something.

When I walked out of that bead shop I knew what I had to build.