I understood that finally.

She had left me the people, and the shop was just the room she’d gathered them in, and the mending was just the reason she gave them to come.

Chapter 15 — A Full Thursday

In April I finished the Reyes wedding dress.

I want to tell you I did it beautifully, and the truth is Lottie fixed two things I’d done wrong and Robin pressed it and Yusuf steamed the veil, so that by the time the young woman came to collect it, it was not my work at all but the work of the whole strange family my wife had left me, which is, I have come to think, the most honest kind of work there is.

Because that is the thing no one tells you about the crafts we imagine are solitary.