It is the easiest kind of good work, finishing what a great gardener planted.

You just keep the water coming.

And on the Thursdays when the shop was full and the kettle was going and Deja was there with Bo, who could walk now and terrorized the wall of thread, and Lottie was holding court in the green chair, and Yusuf was at the machine and Robin was driving in with Wren in the back seat, I would stand at the cutting table with my hands full of some torn ordinary thing and look at the room my wife had built, that I was somehow now keeping, and I would feel her there so strongly it was less like grief than like company.

She had not left me the shop.