She keeps the timber yard accounts on paper. Not because the software is hard, but because her father was an accountant and she knows, in the particular way you know things in this world, that he is watching her work. The columns are neat. She uses a ruler.
Ren left the university in the second year after he died. He had been proud of her position there, prouder than she had been. She had spent eleven years in a department that studied things she had stopped believing mattered, and when he was gone she no longer had a reason to stay. She did not tell herself this clearly at the time. She told herself other things: that she needed air, that the north had always been where she belonged, that the body knows what the mind is slow to catch. All of this was true. None of it was the whole thing.
The timber business is small. She supplies four builders and a restoration contractor who works on old farmhouses. In the mornings she walks the yard before anyone else arrives. The smell of cut pine is sharp and clean, and she thinks sometimes that he would have found it pleasant, if he had come north, if he had visited. He never did.
What she cannot know, because the watching only works one way, is whether he understands now. Whether the full picture, available to him in a way it never was when he was alive, has amounted to comprehension. She understood, in the last years, that his pride in her position at the university was a form of love that had found the wrong channel, but she cannot know if he has understood this too. She is not angry at him. She has not been angry for some time. She would like to know if he sees what she sees when she walks the yard at seven in the morning, the frost still on the upper planks, the light coming in from the east. Whether he sees what she is actually doing here.
She stacks the new invoice folders in the cabinet. Outside, a truck is reversing through the gate. She straightens the ruler on the desk and goes out to meet it.