Because the ledger asked something of me.

It would have been simple to keep the shop as a shop, to take everyone’s money and learn the machine and have a modest little retirement occupation that filled my days, and no one on Delcorte would have thought the worse of me; they’d only have understood that the free years were over, that Franny had been Franny and I was only a man.

But once I had read those pages, once I understood that the shop’s real books had always run in a second currency — one made of attention and forgiveness and no, growing boy — I could not, in conscience, run it any other way and still call it hers.

To take Mr.