The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited his drafting table, the one where coastlines were coaxed from uncertainty into clean ink, as if the sea had always meant to end precisely there.

He drew from memory mostly — not his own, but borrowed from sailors who came back wrong, who described distance the way grief describes itself: by what is missing.

She traces the blank interiors now, the white spaces he left with small notes in the margins: *here the survey party turned back.* *here the light refused to cooperate.*

Some mornings she fills them in — forests, a lake, a settlement named after no one. Some mornings she lets them stay white, which is also a kind of map, a record of all he could not bring himself to guess.

The table still smells of linseed and erasure. She leans over it the same way he did, her shadow falling where his shadow fell, measuring the world by what it withholds.