The Name Badge

Teresa "Tess" Virella is used to staying late. At Firefly Crossing Elementary, she is the dependable one, the calm one, the teacher's aide who knows which children need quiet, which parents need patience, and which rooms hold more than old supplies. But while helping clear out the school's annex wing before demolition, Tess finds a faded laminated name badge wedged behind a metal cabinet. The name belongs to Nicolás "Nico" Otero, a child her mother once cared for years ago, a child Tess was always told had simply moved away. The badge should be nothing more than forgotten school property. Instead, it opens a door. And the closer Tess comes to the truth, the more she begins to understand that her mother's life of service may have been shaped by something far more complicated than goodness. Quietly suspenseful, intimate, and emotionally exact, The Name Badge is a powerful story of buried memory, inherited silence, and the cost of being the woman everyone relies on.