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Then he tapped the left side of the sketch and frowned at it the way he did at a joint that didn’t close tight. “I drew her knot from memory. From the one time I’d held her stamp. It’s close, but it isn’t right.” He looked past me, to the end of my bench. “Would you bring her mark over?”

Her stamp had spent one night in the shop, sitting where I’d set it down after carrying it out of the office yesterday. I told myself I was only moving it. We’d both known better.

I nodded and crossed to my bench. A day out here and she already looked less like a relic and more like a tool between jobs.

I picked her up. The handle was smooth, darkened where years of her grip had worn it. On its face, the Celtic knot stood sharp, MS woven through the lines. Mary Sullivan pressed this into every piece she judged worthy of her name. She told me it was mine to use when I was ready. I’d never once been ready.

I didn’t have to be ready tonight. Nico needed her lines, nothing more. That made it possible to close my hand around her and bring her to him.

He had cleared the end of the workbench and clamped down a square of pine. His grandfather’s stamp stood at its usual post, squared to the edge. I set my grandmother’s down beside it.

The two stamps had never been this close before. St. Petersburg letters and a Celtic knot, an inch apart on a workbench in Massachusetts.

“They’re finally meeting,” Nico said quietly.

He picked up her stamp with the care he saved for finished surfaces. Turning it in the light, he bent over his sketch and redrew two lines of the knot where his memory had missed. He checked his drawing against her carving.

When he was satisfied, he nodded and set her back beside his grandfather.

“Now it’s right.”

We traced the joined marks onto transfer paper, slow, careful work. Nico took his grandfather’s side. I took hers. Then he heated the burning tool and set the first line into the pine. Smoke curled off the iron, pine resin biting sharp at the back of my throat. His grandfather’s grain rose out of the wood pass by pass.

When his half was done, he held the pen out to me, handle first. “Her side is yours.”

My hand was steady. She would have expected that. I followed her lines the way I’d traced them as a kid, on the undersides of her tables. Back before I understood what a maker’s mark meant. The last stroke was the joining point, where his grain flowed into her knot. I laid it in and lifted the pen.

Her mark, in wood, for the first time since she died. Not pressed. Her stamp sat on the bench, waiting for the day I’d use it. But she was out of her box for good now, an inch from the mark of a man who would have understood her.

I studied our first joint mark. “We’re really doing this.”

Nico looked up at me, his eyes bright with unshed tears. “Partners in everything.”

“Partners in everything,” I agreed. “I love you, Nico Stolyarov.”

“I love you too, Jake Sullivan.” Nico picked up the practice piece, holding it like the precious beginning it was.

I looked at the pine square one more time before I followed him. Her knot running into his grain. Whatever we built after tonight was going to carry both of them.

Ten

Nico

I set Jake’s jewelry box on his workbench and checked it over one last time. Its brass hinges opened without friction. The maple had come up blonde and close-grained under the final coat of varnish. A cherry inlay ran the length of the lid. The grain rolled light to dark. Every dovetail was clean, and every surface was smooth as silk.

This was the kind of piece that got passed down. It would outlive us both and carry stories the whole way.

“I can’t believe I actually made this.” Jake ran his fingertips along the edge with a reverence I loved seeing him give his own work.

“You did more than make it. You crafted it. There’s a difference.”

Jake’s gaze found mine, his green eyes bright. “Because of you. You taught me to trust myself.”

“I only reminded you of what you already knew from your grandmother.” I almost left it there. But there was something I’d been waiting weeks to do.

I crossed to my bench. The two stamps sat where we’d put them last night. An inch apart, side by side.

I picked up my grandfather’s mark.