Amaya kept her shop like a promise: compact, sensible, and as precisely ruled as the arch of a fiddle’s belly. Light from the quay slit through the front window in a ribbon, painting the varnish on benches and the iron of tiny clamps. She liked that ribbon; it told her which varnish coat had finished and which still needed time. Tools hung in the order of usefulness—planes with worn handles, files nicked from years of scraping spruce, a block of gouges whose edges she sharpened until they sang. The air tasted faintly of pine and boiled resin, and sometimes, when the tide turned a certain way, she swore she could smell boiled herbs, as if the sea had adopted the town’s kitchen. She would have laughed at that claim if anyone else had made it and not measured it by the way the light slid across a newly jointed seam.
She moved among her pieces like a midwife—hands frequent, patient, exact. Her fingers knew the language of glue and wood better than most tongues. She chose each plank, found its grain, coaxed its curve. When she planned the braces for a back, she traced the invisible lines with her thumbs, feeling where the vibrations would want to travel. ‘‘No improvisation without respect,’’ she would murmur, more to the bench than to any eavesdropper. Friends—few, true—teased her that she loved wood more than people; Amaya preferred to think she loved the loyalty of things.
The shop had a resident cat, brass-collared and opinionated. It claimed a carved viola as its throne and judged new instruments with a flick of the tail. Once, it had batted a rosin cake into a bracing tray and then tried to sleep in the sticky mess. Amaya had laughed—short, surprised—at the sight, and scrubbed the cat’s paws rather than scold it. There was a small, private absurdity in domestic compromises: that a woman who measured sound with calipers could be undone by a purring animal that insisted on sitting exactly where she needed to see the grain.
She put the finished instruments on a rack as if they were a quiet congregation. Each waited its turn to be given life: strings, pegs, the hush of final tuning. Her rule—an oath she never wrote down—was simple and self-protective. “A maker may offer tone,” she told herself, folding the last strip of a bridge, “but must not be consumed by it.” The phrasing was less heroic than it sounded; it was a line drawn in old sap and stubbornness. To weave one’s own heartbeat into an instrument, to let the maker’s pulse be its steadying current, had always felt to Amaya like a theft. She had watched other crafter-friends who vanished into their work; their faces softened, their laughter thinned. She would build, not surrender.