The first breath of Port Marrow air tasted of salt and diesel, familiar as an old scar. Willa Dunmore stood on the tarmac with her duffel bag at her feet, the prop wash from the idling Cessna stirring the loose ends of her hair, and she did not move for a long moment. The regional flight from Portland had been forty minutes of turbulence and canned air, and now the ground tilted beneath her boots, or perhaps that was simply the weight of twelve years settling back into her legs.
Twelve years. The number sat in her chest like a stone she had swallowed and never passed. She had left this airstrip on a June morning with a duffel bag and a one-way ticket and the particular fury of a twenty-three-year-old who believed she had been wronged. She had not come back. Not for the funerals of aunts, not for the renaming of the harbor breakwater, not for the slow closing of the cannery that had once employed half the town.
And now her father was in the hospital, twenty miles north, with a stroke that had taken most of the left side of his body, and Willa had boarded the first flight she could find.
The airstrip consisted of a single cracked runway, a low concrete terminal, and a wind sock that snapped in the onshore breeze. A man in a high-visibility vest was already pulling her small suitcase from the cargo hold, and beyond the chain-link perimeter fence, the town of Port Marrow squatted against the harbor in its accustomed disorder: clapboard houses, rusted pickup trucks, the white steeple of the Congregational church rising above the elms. From here she could see the masts of the fishing boats at their moorings, and further south, the shape of the breakwater her father had charted thirty years ago, the one the town council had finally renamed last spring after a man who had never lived here.
She had opinions about that. She kept them folded away.
"Miss Dunmore?"
The voice came from behind her, low and unhurried, with the particular music of the Atlantic coast that turned terminal vowels into something softer. She turned, and Baz Cole stood beside a mud-splattered pickup truck, one hand resting on the driver's side door.
He looked older. Of course he did. Twelve years would do that to anyone, but on Baz the change was particular: the jaw more defined, the eyes more settled, the sun-weathered tan of someone who spent his days on the water. He wore a canvas jacket smeared with what appeared to be marine epoxy, and his hair, which she remembered as perpetually wind-tossed, was cut short now, practical.
"Baz," she said. His name came out rougher than she intended.
"Heard you were on the manifest," he said. "Figured you'd walk if I didn't come."
"Walk where?"
"Into town. Hospital's twenty miles, and the shuttle only runs Tuesdays and Thursdays."
It was Wednesday. Of course it was.
Willa looked at the truck, then at Baz, then at the terminal building where a woman behind the counter was reading a paperback and not looking at either of them. The calculus was simple and unflattering: she needed the ride. She had not needed anything from anyone in this town for twelve years, and now she needed a ride from a man she had last spoken to at the town dock the summer before she left, when he had been twenty-two and she had been twenty-three and neither of them had said the things that needed saying.
"I can pay you," she said.
Something moved across his face, too quick to read. "Get in the truck, Willa."
She got in the truck.
The interior of the cab smelled of salt air and sawdust and the particular staleness of a vehicle that had spent too many nights parked near the water. A pair of work gloves sat on the dashboard beside a thermos and a folded tide chart. Willa set her duffel between her feet and pulled the seatbelt across her lap, the click loud in the silence.
Baz did not start the engine immediately. He sat with his hands on the wheel, looking out at the airstrip, and then he turned to her.
"You eat on the plane?"
"No."
"There's a place in town. Marcie's. She does a decent omelet."
"I should go to the hospital."
"You should eat," he said. "Hospital's not going anywhere. Neither is he."
The pronoun landed strangely. Willa turned in her seat to look at him. "You've seen him?"
"Saw him yesterday. Brought the truck around for Della to use, since hers finally gave up the ghost." He paused, and the pause held something careful. "He's awake. Mostly. The left side's not cooperating, but he knew who I was."
The knot in Willa's chest loosened by a single degree. She had been told only that there had been a stroke, that it was severe, that she should come. She had not allowed herself to imagine him awake, recognizing anyone. She had imagined the worst in careful detail on the flight, the way she imagined the worst about everything: the beeping monitors, the slack face, the eyes that did not track her when she entered the room.
"He asked about you," Baz said. "First thing, before he asked about the shop."
Willa's throat tightened. She looked out the passenger window at the chain-link fence, at the rusted gate, at the small white sign that read PORT MARROW MUNICIPAL AIRFIELD in letters that had not been repainted since before she was born. "He shouldn't have," she said quietly.
Baz started the engine. The truck shuddered to life with a sound that was somewhere between a complaint and a promise, and he pulled out of the airstrip lot onto the two-lane road that wound down toward the harbor. The conversation, such as it was, seemed to be over.
They drove in silence for a while. The road curved through a stand of spruce, and the air through the open windows carried the green scent of pine needles and the distant brine of the harbor. Willa watched the landscape scroll past, cataloging changes. The old bait shop had become a kayak rental. The Vesper family's farmhouse had been painted a startling yellow. The road sign for Dunmore Daughter Maps, which her father had maintained religiously for forty years, had been removed entirely, the post still standing, the metal brackets rusted into the shape of absence.
She looked away from it.
"You want to know about the shop," Baz said. Not a question.
"I want to know about my father."
"Those are the same thing right now."
The truck crested a small rise, and the harbor came into view below them: the granite breakwater, the cluster of fishing boats at their moorings, the chandlery with its faded sign, the church steeple, the low sprawl of the town. It looked smaller than she remembered. Everything looked smaller, or perhaps she had grown in ways that had nothing to do with height.
"Tell me," she said.
Baz shifted into a lower gear for the descent. "Stroke hit him Sunday night. He was in the back room of the shop, working on a commission. Della found him on the floor when she came in Monday morning." His voice was even, factual, the voice of a man who delivered difficult information without flourish. "Ambulance got there fast. They flew him to Bangor, but he's back at County now. Stable. That's the word they keep using."
"Stable," Willa repeated.
"Stable," he confirmed. "Meaning he's not getting worse. Meaning there's a bed and a nurse and a schedule for his physical therapy. Meaning your aunt Della has been sleeping in the chair beside his bed for three nights and she looks like she could use a meal herself."
Willa absorbed this. Her aunt Della. Her father's younger sister, who had helped raise her after her mother died, who had married a lobsterman and moved to the next town over, who had been one of the few people Willa had exchanged Christmas cards with in the intervening years, the cards growing more formal with each passing season.
"And the shop?" she asked.
"Closed. For now. There's a sign on the door."
"What's in the sign?"
Baz glanced at her. "Closed for family emergency. Back soon."
She almost laughed. It caught in her throat as something closer to a sob, and she pressed her knuckles against her mouth until the feeling passed. Her father had written that sign himself, she was certain. He would have insisted on the wording. He would have chosen the font. He would have considered the period after "emergency" and decided it was necessary, because Otto Dunmore believed that sentences should end decisively.
"Back soon," she repeated.
"He'll want it to be true," Baz said.
The road leveled out as they reached the harbor proper.
The cab was a ten-year-old Camry with a cracked dashboard and a pine freshener that had stopped pretending to be pine sometime during the previous administration. Sal, the driver, was a man in his seventies with a face like a dried apple and a thermos of coffee wedged between his thighs. She told him the name of the inn, then told him slowly, take the long way, and he said, "Long way it is," and pulled out onto the harbor road without enthusiasm or haste.
The pier came first. She turned in her seat to watch it pass.
The pilings were the same grey her father had taught her to mix from raw umber and a touch of ivory black. The herring gulls roosted in tidy rows along the railing, their heads tucked against the wind, their patience longer than hers had ever been. The bait shop at the foot of the ramp had changed hands. Where her grandfather's careful copperplate had once announced Dunmore Son, Marine Supplies, there was now a vinyl shout of Captain Pete's Live Bait Tackle, and a bell that rang every time the door swung open. Her grandfather had been dead thirty years. The loss of his sign still felt like an argument she had not been present for.
She had walked this pier at six in the morning when she was seven, her hand in her father's, his voice low and instructive as he named the boats. The Margaret M., out of Camden. The Sea Witch, out of Stonington. The Lady Esther, her great-aunt, who had lent her name to her grandfather's first seiner and whose portrait hung in the bookshop above the register. Willa had loved those walks. She had also, at fourteen, decided she would never work on the water, that she would draw maps instead of catching fish, and that her father would understand, because her father had understood everything about her until the year she left, and then suddenly had not understood anything at all.
She had not been back since her mother's funeral, which had been a cold bright day in March when the daffodils were refusing to come up and the church had been too warm and the reception at Aunt Della's house had been filled with people who had known Della longer than they had known Willa, and who had looked at Willa with the polite, careful curiosity reserved for prodigals in fine coats.
"First time in town?" Sal asked.
"No. Long time."
"Most people who come back after a long time, they're looking for the place they remember. The place they find is the place they remember. Mostly it's the people that have changed."
She did not answer him. She watched the pier fall behind them in the side mirror, the bait shop growing small and ordinary, the gulls lifting off in a soft grey explosion as a dog ran along the dock.
The ice cream shack was next. It had been, in her childhood, a turquoise-painted hut on a corner lot called Midge's, where Midge herself, a woman built like a fireplug with a voice like a foghorn, had served soft-serve in sugar cones for fifty cents and had known the name of every child in the school district. Willa had worked there one summer at sixteen, the summer before she left for college, scraping the melted drips off the floor and reading romance novels behind the register when the lunch rush was over. She had been kissed for the first time behind the propane tanks by a boy named Todd Aucoin who had gone on to marry a lobsterman's daughter and live in a house on the back road.
The shack was still turquoise. It was still called Midge's, though Midge had been gone for years. The hand-lettered menu board was new, the plastic letters charmingly crooked. A teenaged girl in a puffy jacket was leaning in the window, scrolling her phone.
"Want me to stop?" Sal asked.
"No," she said. "Just looking."
"Just looking," he repeated, as if this were a phrase he understood.
The road curved away from the harbor and up into the residential streets, where the houses were clapboard and the lawns were still green in defiance of the season, and the maple trees had gone crimson and orange in a riot that smelled, when she rolled down her window a crack, of wet leaves and woodsmoke and the particular loamy sweetness of a New England October. She let the air into the cab and breathed it in. The smell of her childhood, which she had not realized she had been missing until it was in the car.
The inn was a Victorian on a side street, painted a soft yellow that had weathered to cream, with a wraparound porch and a sign that read The Mariner's Rest in a font that someone had tried to make look old and had mostly succeeded. Sal pulled up in front and cut the engine and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel.
"You from here," he said. It was not a question.
"Born here."
"Lot of people leave this town. Lot of people come back. You figure out which one you are yet?"
She paid him, with a tip that was too large because she could not say why, and watched him drive away. Then she stood on the sidewalk with her bag at her feet and let the town look at her for a while.
She checked into her room. It was small and clean and smelled of lavender sachets and old radiators. She washed her face in the bathroom, which had a claw-foot tub and a window that looked out onto a hydrangea bush that had gone bronze in the cold. She sat on the edge of the bed and looked at her phone. There were messages from people she had not heard from in years, all of them variations on the same theme. She did not answer any of them. She lay down on the bedspread, which smelled faintly of mothballs, and closed her eyes for what she meant to be a minute.
She woke at dusk. The light in the room had gone the color of weak tea. She lay still and listened to the town settling around her. A dog barking two houses down. The clang of a screen door. The distant, sweet complaint of a foghorn out in the channel.
She got up. She brushed her hair. She put on the coat she had been wearing since she had landed at the airport that morning, the good one, the one she had bought for job interviews, the one that smelled of nothing in particular except, faintly, of the dry cleaning fluid of the city she had been living in. She left the inn and walked.
The bookshop was a ten-minute walk from the inn if she took the shortcut through the alley behind the hardware store, and she took the shortcut because she did not want to arrive too soon, and because she wanted to see the shop from the back first, the part the public never saw, the loading dock where her father used to receive crates of antiquarian maps from auctions in London and Boston and once, memorably, from a widow in Lisbon who had insisted on paying in escudos.
The alley smelled of cardboard and old rope. A cat watched her from a dumpster lid with the regal disinterest of its kind. The back of the bookshop rose up before her, three stories of red brick and tall windows, the windows dark now except for one on the second floor where a light burned, and the flicker of a light in the basement, down the exterior stairs that led to the cellar door.
She had not told her father she was coming. She had not known how.
She came around the side of the building and stopped.
The shop occupied the ground floor of a Victorian on the corner of Harbor and Chestnut, a building that had been in the family since her great-grandfather had bought it in 1923 from a Norwegian sea captain who had lost it in a poker game. The facade had been repainted since she had last seen it, a deep slate blue with cream trim, and the new sign over the door read Dunmore Daughters in raised gilt lettering on a dark green background. Her breath caught, and she had to put her hand against the lamppost.
Daughters. Not Daughter. Plural.
Her father had changed the sign.
She stood there for a long moment, letting the word move through her the way a wave moves through a hull, slow and total. Daughters. As if there were more than one of her. As if he had been waiting. As if the sign had been waiting, all these years, for the daughter he had, to come back and stand in front of it, and for whatever daughter he had lost, to come back and stand beside her.
She almost turned around. She almost went back to the inn and called the hospital and said she would come in the morning. She almost did several reasonable, prudent things.
Instead she pushed open the door.
The bell above the door rang, the same brass bell that had rung for her grandfather and her father and would, presumably, ring for whoever came after, and the smell of the shop hit her like a hand to the chest. Paper, of course. Old paper, the sweet dusty vanilla of it. Linseed oil from the lamp her father kept burning on the counter in the winter. The faint ghost of her mother's perfume, tuberose, which had not been in this shop for fifteen years but which still haunted the curtains at the front window, as if it had soaked in and refused to leave.
The shop was dim. The lamps were off. The only light came from the basement, spilling up the cellar stairs in a yellow wedge, and from a single worklight clamped to the edge of the counter, illuminating the till and the daybook and a half-eaten apple that had begun to brown at the cut.
Voices rose from the basement. A man's voice, low and deliberate, with the cadence of someone who had said the same thing three times already and was preparing to say it a fourth. And another voice, higher, sharper, belonging to a man who was losing patience with the first man for reasons Willa could not yet discern.
She stepped to the top of the basement stairs. The wooden treads creaked under
her weight, and the sound traveled down into the cellar like a stone dropped into still water. Below, the conversation stopped.
The basement of Dunmore and Daughter Maps had not changed in twenty years. The same fieldstone walls, cool and faintly sweating in summer, dry as kindling in winter. The same long worktable scarred with the old compass points and the rings of a thousand coffee cups. The same press in the corner, iron and oak, that her grandfather had carried across the harbor on a hand-cart in the spring of 1947 and had refused to motorize ever since, on principle, because, as he had told her once, a machine that did not sweat had no business making a map. The smell was different from upstairs. Upstairs was paper and time. Downstairs was the wet-dog scent of sizing paste and the sharp bite of ammonia used for cleaning vellum, and under that, the clean mineral smell of the well water that crept through the north wall whenever the tide ran high.
Baz Cole stood at the worktable with his back to her. He wore the same canvas jacket he had worn every autumn since they were children, the one with the salt-stiffened cuffs and the brass buttons gone green with verdigris. He was bent over something she could not see, his shoulders a hard line beneath the coat, one hand resting flat on the table as if to steady either the object or himself. Beside him, Otto Dunmore sat on the tall stool he kept down here for the days when his knees gave him trouble. Her father held a magnifying loupe to one eye and a thin bone folder in the other, and his face, when he looked up at her on the stairs, had the particular stillness of a man who had been waiting for a person and was now pretending he had not been waiting at all.
"Will," he said.
She descended the last four steps. The third from the bottom groaned the way it always had, the way it would groan for whoever came after, and she felt the floorboards give under her heel and remembered being seven and sneaking down after closing to look at the great charts her father kept in the long drawer, the ones with the sea monsters curling in the margins, the kraken and the merrow and the great green fish that swallowed the ships.
"What are you two doing down here at this hour?" she asked. Her voice came out steadier than she had expected.
Otto set the loupe down. He did not answer her question. He looked at Baz, and Baz did not turn around, and after a moment Otto looked back at her with the small apologetic tilt of his head that she had learned, as a child, meant that an explanation was coming and that she would not enjoy it.
"There's someone upstairs," Otto said.
She heard it then, the creak of the boards above. Footsteps moving slowly across the front room, the ones she had just walked through. The bell had not rung again, which meant whoever it was had come in through the back. Her heart did something she did not authorize, a hard thump against her ribs that was not quite pain and not quite fear but lived in the country between them. She put one hand on the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and held it there.
"Rufus," she said. It was not a question.
Baz turned then. She had forgotten, in the years since she had seen him up close, the particular color of his eyes, the way the grey in them picked up the worklamp and went the color of cold slate in this light. He looked at her as if she were a piece of weather he had not expected, and then he looked past her up the stairs, and the line of his jaw tightened in a way she recognized from the summer his father had died, when he had come to ask Otto for a loan and Otto had given him one and not mentioned it again.
"He's been in town since Tuesday," Baz said. "He's been sleeping in the back of the chandlery. He came to the shop an hour ago and I told him to wait upstairs."
"You should have called me," Willa said.
"I should have called you," Baz agreed, in a tone that suggested he had thought about it and decided against it and was not, at this particular moment, prepared to apologize for the decision.
Otto made a small sound. He folded the bone folder into his palm and closed his hand around it, the way her mother used to fold her reading glasses, with the same absent precision, the same tenderness for the tool. "He's not well, Willa."
"I know," she said. She had not known, and she knew now, and the difference between the two was a kind of injury she would examine later, when she was alone, when she was somewhere she did not have to be brave. "I came because I knew." It was the truest thing she had said in a year, and it cost her something to say it, and she felt the cost settle into her chest like a cold coin.
The footsteps above stopped. There was a silence, the kind that has weight and edges. Then a chair scraped against the floor, and a man's voice, hoarse and careful, called down the stairs.
"Otto?"
It was not Otto he was asking for. They all knew that. The sound of the name in Rufus Cole's mouth went through Willa like a wave through a mooring line, tautening something that had been slack for a long time.
Otto stood up
Otto stood up. He did not say anything. He set the bone folder on the workbench with the same absent precision his daughter had inherited without realizing it, and he crossed the shop floor toward the narrow staircase at the back of the room. The boards complained softly under his weight. He moved the way a man moves when he has been waiting a long time and has stopped hoping, and then the thing he had stopped hoping for arrives anyway, and he must remember how to walk toward it.
Willa watched him go. She did not follow. Her hands were full of her mother's glasses and she had not yet figured out where to put them down.
Baz moved first. He stepped around the workbench, his boots heavy on the worn pine, and took the stairs two at a time. Not hurrying, exactly, but not waiting either. The particular rhythm of a man who had done a thing he did not want to do and had decided to do it thoroughly. Halfway up, he paused and looked back over his shoulder.
"You coming?" he said to Willa.
She shook her head. She could not have said why. The glasses in her hand were warm from the pocket of her coat. She set them on the workbench, gently, beside the bone folder, and the two objects lay together in the slant of afternoon light like a small still life of her mother's absence.
From above, the sound of Baz's voice, low and even. "Rufus."
Then a silence that had corners.
Then Otto's voice, very quiet. "Son."
The word went through the floorboards and into Willa's chest. She pressed her palm flat against the workbench and breathed.
She had known Rufus Cole since she was nine years old and he was twelve and had fallen off the roof of his father's chandlery and broken his wrist in two places. She had been the one to run for Otto, because Otto was the only adult in the harbor who could set a bone without fainting at the sight of it. Otto had carried the boy into the back room of the map shop, and Willa had held Rufus's good hand while Otto worked, and Rufus had not made a sound, only gripped her fingers hard enough that she felt the bones of his hand shift under her own. She had been terrified of him then. She had been in love with him by the time he was sixteen and reckless and beautiful in the way that some boys are beautiful only for one summer before the sea takes it out of them. She had been the one to say no, the summer she was nineteen and he was twenty-two and he had come to her with a ring that wasn't a ring and a question that wasn't a question, and she had said no because she could see the road he was on, and she had loved him too much to step onto it with him.
That was eleven years ago. She had not seen him since.
She heard Otto's footsteps on the boards above. She heard Baz's voice, low, indistinguishable. She heard the scrape of a chair being drawn closer to another chair. Then she heard, very faintly, the sound she had not expected to hear again, not in this shop, not in this lifetime. Rufus Cole laughed, once, a single short exhalation, the way a man laughs when he has not laughed in a long time and the muscles have almost forgotten.
Willa sat down on the stool behind the workbench. She put both hands flat on the wood. She waited.
The minutes passed. The shop smelled of paper and old glue and the salt that came in under the door whenever the wind set right. A map she had been restoring for a week, a chart of Penobscot Bay from 1847, lay open on the board, and she studied it without seeing it, the way a person studies a familiar thing when they need something to hold their eyes while their mind does other work.
She thought about her mother. Della Dunmore had known Rufus too, had watched him grow up alongside Willa, had made him sardine sandwiches on hot August afternoons when the Cole boys came to swim off the dock behind the shop. Della had been the one to warn Willa, the summer of the not-ring, in that soft way of hers that was not a warning at all but only a question asked into the air. "He's a sweet boy, that Rufus. I do wonder what he is sweet on." And Willa had understood that her mother had seen, and that Della would never say so directly, and that this was Della's way of holding the door open for her daughter to walk through it on her own.
She had walked through. She had said no. She had been right to say no. She had been sorry about it for years.
The footsteps above moved toward the stairs. Willa stood up. She did not know why she stood up, except that some instinct told her that whatever was about to come down those stairs was something she should be standing for.
Otto came down first. His face was the color of old paper. He held the banister with one hand and the other hand he held out slightly from his side, the way a man holds a hand out when he has just steadied someone through a door.
Behind him, Baz, one arm hooked under another man's arm, taking most of the weight.
Behind Baz, Rufus.
He was smaller than she remembered. That was the first thing. Smaller in the shoulders, smaller in the face, the way a man becomes smaller when something has been eating him from the inside for a long time. His hair was shorter than it had been, and darker than it had been, and there was a scar through his left eyebrow she did not recognize. His hands were big still. His eyes, when they found her across the room, were the same eyes she had held onto that summer afternoon when she was nine and he was twelve and the world had been made of nothing but salt air and a broken wrist.
He did not speak. He looked at her for a long moment, and she looked at him, and the shop was very quiet.
"You look well, Willa," he said. His voice was the hoarse careful voice from the stairs, but softer now, almost gentle. As if he had been saving the words in his mouth for a long time and was being careful with them.
"I am," she said. "Are you?"
"No," he said, simply. "But I am here."
Baz guided him to the stool Willa had just vacated. Rufus sat down on it heavily, the way a man sits when his legs have decided, without consulting him, that they are finished. Otto pulled the other stool around and sat across from him, knees almost touching, the way he used to sit across from Della in this same shop in the last months of her life.
"There's tea," Otto said. "And there's bread, if you can eat it."
"I can eat it," Rufus said. "I haven't eaten in two days. I came up on the bus from Portland with nothing in my pockets and a note in my boot that said your name on it."
He reached down and fumbled at his boot and drew out a small folded paper, soft from sweat and handling, and held it out to Otto. Otto took it with both hands, the way he took any paper, with the same attention, the same respect, and unfolded it.
Willa, standing by the workbench, could not read it from where she was. She did not need to. She could see Otto's face as he read it, and she could see the slow way the breath left him, and she could see him fold the paper again, very carefully, along its original creases, and put it in his breast pocket.
"It's from your father," Otto said to Rufus, very quietly.
"I know," Rufus said. "I found it in his desk, after. I'd forgotten it. I'd forgotten everything in that desk. I don't know what he meant by your name on it. I don't know what he meant by anything, in the end. I only knew I had to come back."
Otto reached out and put his hand on Rufus's knee. He did not say anything. He did not need to. The hand on the knee was enough.
Baz stood by the stairs with his arms folded and his face turned toward the door. He was looking at something outside, or at nothing. Willa could see the line of his jaw working, and the way he swallowed once, hard, and then again.
"Baz," Rufus said, without turning his head.
"I'm here," Baz said.
"I know you are."
"I know you know."
Otto stood up. "I'll make the tea," he said. "Willa, get the bread. The brown loaf, in the tin by the window. Baz, fetch the chair from the back room for yourself, if you're going to stand there like a man waiting for a ferry."
He said it the way he said everything, with that rough papery warmth that had carried Willa through the worst year of her life and was carrying Rufus Cole through whatever was about to begin. He crossed the shop toward the little stove in the corner, and he took down the kettle, and he set it on the burner, and his hands, Willa saw, were trembling. Only a little. Only enough that she knew, and Baz knew, and Rufus did not yet know, that Otto was afraid of something, and that the fear was not of the man on the stool but of how much love there was in the room and how little practice any of them had in letting it show.
Willa crossed to the window and lifted the lid off the tin. The brown loaf was there, half a loaf, the end wrapped in waxed paper the way Della used to wrap it. She cut three thick slices and set them on a board and brought them to the workbench. She did not look at Rufus as she did it. She was not ready to look at him again. She was not sure she would ever be ready, and she suspected he felt the same.
Baz brought the chair from the back room. He set it down beside his brother's stool and sat in it, close enough that his knee touched Rufus's in the same way Otto's knee had touched it from the other side. He did not put his hand anywhere. He did not need to. The knee was enough.
The kettle began to tick on the stove. Otto opened the tea cupboard and took down the caddy, and the small brass hinges of the caddy gave a sound like a bell being struck once and softly in a quiet room.
Rufus Cole sat on the stool in the afternoon light of the shop where he had been brought as a boy with a broken wrist, and he was home.