There is only continuing it, which is the same as thanks, and better.

That was the night I stopped finishing Franny’s work and started doing my own.

Chapter 12 — Robin Comes

I told Robin, on our next Sunday call, that I was keeping the shop.

I braced for the sensible objections.

Instead there was one of our long silences, and then my daughter said, in a voice I had not heard from her in years, “Can I come see it?”

She drove the ninety minutes on a Saturday and stood in the doorway of her mother’s shop the way I had stood on the sidewalk in November, unable, for a moment, to come in.