The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world through her father's hands, the way a coastline trembles under ink, how fjords are the earth's held breath, slow exhale into cold water.

His maps were never finished. He left margins for what he couldn't name— the places where the ferry light bends wrong in autumn, where the gulls go silent for no reason.

She still folds paper the way he taught her, crease aligned to crease, the continent halved, then quartered, then gone into something small enough to keep.

She draws her own maps now, not of land but of the hours— the coffee cooling, the key in the lock, the particular dark of 4 a.m. when a house holds its shape without you.