It was simply what a person did with a needle and a good heart and a corner shop on a street full of people she loved.

I sat with the ledger a long time.

Then I found a pen, and I turned to a clean page, and under the last of her entries I wrote the date, and the first job I had let off free, and beside it, because I did not know yet how to be her but I knew how to copy her hand, I wrote no.

It was, I think, the first genuine decision I made in that shop — not the drifting, not the finishing-the-basket, but a choice.