Content Warning: This section features discussions of domestic violence.

Hannah’s beaded safety pin is a sentimental possession that she keeps with her at all times to comfort herself after her mother’s death. Made when she was seven, the year her father left, the pin was originally meant to be a gift for her mother. However, the night Hannah plans to give the pin to her mother is the same night her mother’s boyfriend begins to abuse her mother, and Hannah hides in her closet all night, forgetting about the pin. After her mother’s death, over 20 years later, Hannah finds the pin hidden away in her mother’s jewelry box and attaches it to a chain so she can wear it every day.

At first, the pin seems like a good luck charm for Hannah, and the term “safety pin” takes on an almost literal significance, for every time she touches the pin, she feels a much-needed boost of confidence, comfort, or security. And just as the safety pin comes to represent emotional security, its loss likewise represents the early loss of Hannah’s sense of personal safety when she was a child. She tells Jack that on the night her mother was beaten, she “didn’t feel safe anymore” (284), a feeling that coincided with the original loss of the pin.