Lena Wilder kept her hands busy because idle fingers were where grief nested. The workshop smelled of lavender oil and old wood shavings, the tinny radio tuned to a station that played enough soft voices to make the ghosts in the corners feel unwanted. Her bench was a long scarred plank under a window that looked down onto Main Street, where the town went about its little, stubborn life: deliveries, dog walkers, teenagers on bikes, the occasional funeral procession that made even the town clock lower its hands for a beat.
Objects came to Lena the way birds return in spring: inevitable and bearing more than their feathers. People brought her things that had been dropped in attics, washed from basements, found between the seat cushions of sofas or unearthed from boxes labelled with names they no longer used. She repaired what could be repaired and, sometimes, she listened: not with curiosity but with trained, professional attention. She had learned to hear the thin, frayed language of cloth and wood, the way a seam might hold a tremor of laughter, a button a cadence of a voice. She called herself a restorer; the town called her useful; a few people called her meddling. Lena called herself someone who kept doors open while other people slept.
Six years had tightened her jaw into a map of bargains she had no intention of keeping. Noa Wilder, younger by three years and lighter in every room they once shared, had gone one late autumn afternoon and somehow unraveled the household into a series of pauses that never found a beat again. Police files ran cold; neighbors grew practiced with condolence; the small, heavy things Noa had touched—her chipped mug, a keychain with a missing star, a thin scarf knitted with clumsy care—sat in Lena’s home like uninvited memorials. Lena kept them the way one keeps a map to a place you might never revisit. She had also kept a habit: when a thing came in that made a sound she could not attribute to age, she cleaned it with her hands and gave it a corner of sunlight. It had always felt like a kindness, and kindness kept people trusting her business.