Nara returned to her shop to find a patron waiting: a young cartographer with ink still damp on his fingers — the same man whose hands she had once almost followed into the hinterlands. He had come back to the city after years away and carried, folded in a parcel, a map that had a single blank fork where a river might go.
"Yes," she said. "We'll draw a fork that leads to somewhere both of us can go."
"—what?" The wind answered for the woman: the rustle of anonymous papers, the faint crash of someone somewhere deciding not to leave.