The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherits his tools the way rivers inherit their bends — not chosen, only shaped by what the land refused to hold.

The compasses point toward different norths than the one he mapped. She measures her distances in what she hasn't said, in rooms that still smell of his drafting pencil.

Every shoreline is approximate. He taught her this, drawing the coast again and again until it looked less like land and more like longing.

She traces the pale creases in his maps, where the paper folds and the mountain vanishes, where the legend runs out of symbols for the territories between people.

Now she names things he left blank — the inlet where they argued until dark, the ridge she climbed alone at seventeen. She writes her own small notations in the margins: here the fog did not lift; here I kept walking anyway.