The Cartographer's Daughter

She inherited her father's hands — broad palms, ink-stained at the mounts of Jupiter and Saturn, fingers that moved over vellum as though reading braille from coastlines.

She never learned to use his instruments, the brass surveyor's wheel, the clinometer, but she learned to walk a room the way he mapped terrain: edge first, then center, orienting.

At his desk after the funeral she unrolled a chart of a coast that no longer existed — shifted by storms, eaten by the patient sea — and understood that all his careful lines were only guesses held with great conviction.

Now she draws her own maps, freehand, where the legend reads: *here be grief,* *here be the house I grew up in,* *here be the distance between us measured in years I did not visit.*