“She already saw the preview photos,” I told her, laughing.

“She said it looks better than the day her grandmother bought it, a hundred years ago.” Better than before it broke.

I knew exactly what that felt like.

People ask me, sometimes, why I chose this particular work — why a woman who could have done anything with her second life chose to spend it in a barn with sandpaper and wood glue, mending other people’s broken chairs.

And the truth is that I did not entirely choose it; it chose me, or the metaphor did, and I only had the sense to follow it.