The Heirloom Seed Courtship

• Chapter 1 The Sample Case and the Sentinel
• Chapter 2 Proofs and Heirloom Vines
• Chapter 3 The Brandywine Bargain
• Chapter 4 Ink on the Heartland
• Chapter 5 A Salesman’s Promise
• Chapter 6 Cultivating Doubts
• Chapter 7 The Cedar Rapids Fair
• Chapter 8 Root Bound Secrets
• Chapter 9 Paper Promises, Soil Truths
• Chapter 10 The Midsummer Blight
• Chapter 11 Tending the Rows
• Chapter 12 Cross-Pollination
• Chapter 13 The Pressroom Confrontation
• Chapter 14 Letters in the Seed Bin
• Chapter 15 A Storm Over Black Hawk County
• Chapter 16 Harvest of Hesitation
• Chapter 17 The Autumn Catalog
• Chapter 18 Pruning the Past
• Chapter 19 Preserves and Pride
• Chapter 20 The First Hard Frost
• Chapter 21 Winter Wheat and Open Heart
• Chapter 22 The Traveling Trunk
• Chapter 23 Seeds in the Snow
• Chapter 24 Early Thaw
• Chapter 25 The Spring Supplement
• Chapter 26 A Garden for Two

The morning passenger train out of Dubuque delivered Thomas Vance to the platform with a hiss of steam, a screech of iron, and a swirl of black coal smoke that settled like fine pepper over his straw boater hat. Thomas dusted his lapels with a well-practiced flick of his wrist, adjusted his high celluloid collar, and reached down to take hold of the heavy brass-bound handle of his leather sample case. It was June of 1924, and the rolling hills of Black Hawk County, Iowa, lay bathed in a pale, humid gold that promised a scorcher by noon.

Thomas was thirty-two, tall, and possessed a warm, easy smile that had served him well from the Ohio river towns all the way across the Mississippi. He was a salesman by trade, but in his own mind, he was an evangelist for the soil. Where other men sold lightning rods, liniments, or sewing machines from the back of a canvas-topped wagon, Thomas sold life in tiny glassine envelopes. His trunk was packed with linen shirts and spare socks, but his heavy leather case—the one he guarded with his life—was packed with neat cedar drawers containing the pure, unadulterated genetics of the Midwest’s finest heirlooms.

He set out down the gravel main street of the town, past the bank with its fresh limestone facade and the dry goods store where a brand-new Model T sedan sat idling with a tinny, rhythmic rattle. Dust rose around the heels of his leather shoes. Thomas didn't mind the dust; it was Iowa dust, rich and dark, thick with decomposed prairies of a thousand years. It smelled of potential.

His destination sat at the far end of the commercial block, where the gravel gave way to the packed dirt of the mill road. A two-story frame building painted a sensible barn red bore a freshly lettered sign across its wooden header: Sterling Farm Publications & Job Printing. Beneath the primary name, smaller white lettering announced: Home of the Black Hawk County Farmers' Agricultural Gazette & Seed Index.

Thomas stopped on the boardwalk outside, switching his heavy case to his left hand and wiping his brow with a folded handkerchief. This was the place. For three weeks, he had been hearing about the Sterling establishment at farm bureau meetings and county seat diners. Frank Sterling had built the enterprise into a local institution, printing harvest schedules, livestock notices, and an annual mail-order catalog that half the county relied upon to choose their spring plantings. But Frank Sterling had succumbed to influenza two winters back, leaving the press, the debt, and the editorial pen in the hands of his young widow.

The gossip in the hotel parlors suggested Clara Sterling would fold the operation within six months. The gossip was now two years out of date, and by all accounts, Mrs. Sterling was running the printing press with the cold precision of a clockwork motor and the skepticism of an old judge.

Thomas checked his tie in the reflection of the display window, pushed open the screen door, and stepped into the cool, ink-scented shadows of the shop.

The air inside was a pungent draft of kerosene, damp paper, lead type, and the crisp, green scent of cut hay blowing through the open rear loading bay. A heavy Miehle cylinder press dominated the center of the room, its iron gears resting in temporary silence, though a smaller foot-powered platen press in the corner was currently clack-clack-clacking like a busy woodpecker.

Behind the high oak counter that separated the public counter from the ink-stained floor of the pressroom stood a woman. She was holding a wooden composing stick in her left hand and a pair of steel tweezers in her right, dropping individual pieces of metal type into place with quick, practiced flicks of her fingers.

She did not look up immediately when the bell above the door chimed. "If you're looking for the county clerk, he's at the courthouse until noon," she said, her voice clear, midwestern, and entirely unembellished. "If you're here to pay for an obituary, step to the desk and leave the copy. I'll read it when I finish this column."

Thomas tipped his hat and walked toward the counter, letting the heavy sample case land on the polished oak with a solid, weighty thud.

"I’m not looking for the clerk, Mrs. Sterling," Thomas said, offering his best broad-spectrum smile. "And so far as I know, everyone I care about is still walking upright. My name is Thomas Vance. I represent the Heartland Heritage Seed Company, operating out of the Cedar River Valley."

Clara Sterling set her tweezers down on the chase with a quiet clink. She wiped her thumbs on a grease-stained apron tied tightly over a dark blue cotton dress, then turned her full attention to the man on the other side of the counter.

She was smaller than Thomas had expected from her formidable reputation, but she carried herself with an erect, immovable posture that made her seem taller. Her dark brown hair was pulled back into a sensible knot at the nape of her neck, though a few rebellious wisps had escaped to curl around her temples in the damp heat. Her eyes were a sharp, clear gray—the color of river slate—and they took Thomas in from his polished shoes to his boater hat in a single, unhurried sweep.

"A seed salesman," she said flatly. She didn't offer her hand. "Mr. Vance, if I had a bushel of corn for every seed peddler who walked through that door between April and July, I could feed every hog in Black Hawk County through the winter. I don't buy seeds at the counter, and I don't print advertisements for itinerant companies without a fifty percent cash deposit up front."

"A very prudent policy," Thomas said smoothly, resting his hand casually on the brass latch of his leather case. "Most seed peddlers are selling commercial bulk trash—flint corn that produces three blind stalks out of five, or cabbage seed imported from Germany that rots before the third leaf shows. I don't deal in bulk trash, Mrs. Sterling."

"They all say that, Mr. Vance," Clara replied, stepping around the composing table and approaching the counter. She rested her forearms on the wood, looking him dead in the eye. She smelled faintly of lavender oil and printers' varnish. "The man who came through last May swore on his mother's grave that his 'Wonder-Yield' sweet corn would produce three ears to the stalk in a dry summer. My neighbor planted ten acres of it. Half of it never germinated, and the half that did was so tough the cows wouldn't eat it. He blamed the catalog. He blamed me because I printed the ad."

"Then your neighbor was swindled by a man selling unstable hybrids," Thomas said, his voice dropping its commercial cadence and taking on a quiet, genuine intensity that caught her slightly off guard. "And you were wronged for putting your ink on his lies. I don't ask you to print a line for me on faith, Mrs. Sterling. I came here because I read your spring edition of the Gazette back in Cedar Rapids. You wrote an editorial on the decline of the local kitchen garden. You said the big commercial houses out of Chicago were turning Iowa farms into single-crop factories and killing off the flavor of the American table."

Clara crossed her arms, her chin lifting half an inch. "I did write that. Because it's true."

"It is true," Thomas agreed. "Which is why I brought you something you haven't seen in a catalog since before the war."

With a deft flick of his thumbs, Thomas popped the heavy brass clasps on his leather case. The sides fell open on brass hinges, revealing a mahogany frame holding eight narrow, baize-lined drawers. Each drawer was fitted with small glass bottles and folded glassine envelopes, neatly labeled in fine, black India ink.

Clara glanced down despite herself. The organization was meticulous. There was no clutter, no colorful paper posters promising impossible yields, no snake-oil showmanship. Just rows of cream-colored packets and polished glass filled with seeds of varying shapes, sizes, and shades of tan, brown, and speckled bronze.

"Heirlooms," she murmured, her gray eyes flickering over the labels. "Ponderosa. Yellow Plum. Cherokee Purple. German Johnson." She paused, her eyes narrowing as she looked up at him. "These are garden seeds. Specialty crops."

"These are history, Mrs. Sterling," Thomas said softly. He pulled a small glassine envelope from the second drawer and held it out between two fingers. "This is the true Brandywine tomato. Not the degraded commercial strain the big houses are shipping out of Philadelphia, but the original potato-leaf stock preserved by the Amish in Chester County forty years ago. Thin skin. Deep pink flesh. Sweet enough to eat like a peach right off the vine, with enough acid to hold up in a mason jar through January."

Clara looked at the envelope, then at Thomas’s face. She saw no glibness there now—only the quiet, stubborn passion of a true believer. It was a look she recognized, because she saw it every time she looked in the mirror before locking up the pressroom for the night. But recognition did not mean trust. Trust was an expensive commodity in the printing business, paid for in ink, paper stock, and ruined reputations.

"A tomato doesn't mean a thing in an envelope, Mr. Vance," Clara said, leaning back and resting her hands on her hips. "A tomato only matters when it's sitting on a scale or cooking in a pot. You can tell me it tastes like a peach, but until I see how it handles Iowa clay and a July drought, it’s just six lines of copy I haven't been paid to set."

Thomas smiled, a slow, genuine expression that reached his eyes. "Fair enough, Mrs. Sterling. I wouldn't expect a woman who runs her own cylinder press to take a stranger's word for it. How about a bargain?"

"I don't make bargains with traveling men," she said crisping up instantly.

"Not a commercial bargain," Thomas clarified, lifting his hands in a gesture of peace. "A practical one. I am setting up trial beds on the old Miller place just south of the creek—I've leased three acres of bottomland for the summer to maintain my seed stocks. I'm planting out my germinations this week. Let me bring you a dozen starts of the Brandywine. You plant them in your back garden. Treat them as hard as you like. If they don't produce the finest tomato you've ever put on your supper table by August, I'll pay you full commercial rate for a half-page ad in your autumn catalog and never darken your door again."

Clara stared at him, looking for the catch. "And if they do?"

"If they do," Thomas said, his tone turning business-like once more, "you give me two columns in the spring index to sell my heirloom strains to your readers, and you let me prove that Black Hawk County can grow more than just field corn and pigs."

Clara stood silent for a long moment. The foot-press in the corner clicked softly as the draft from the back door fanned the edge of a fresh stack of handbills. She looked at the brass-bound case, then at the salesman standing before her, looking every bit like a man who believed the world could be saved by a handful of seeds.

"Twelve plants, Mr. Vance," she said coldly, though her gray eyes held a spark of something dangerously like interest. "And if they get the blight, you owe me five dollars for the paper I wasted listening to you."

"Deal," Thomas said, stepping forward and offering his hand across the counter.

Clara looked at his long, clean fingers, hesitated for a beat, and then took his hand in a brief, firm grip. Her palm was calloused from metal type and wooden press-handles, her skin dusted with fine graphite. Thomas’s grip was warm, dry, and steady.

"Twelve plants," she repeated, pulling her hand back and picking up her composing stick. "Brought to my back gate by six o'clock tomorrow morning. I work for a living, Mr. Vance, and I don't keep parlor hours for salesmen."

"Six o'clock it is," Thomas said. He closed his leather case with two sharp clicks, tipped his straw boater, and turned toward the screen door. "Good day, Mrs. Sterling. Mind the ink on your thumbs."

Before she could form a reply, Thomas Vance was out the door and stepping off the boardwalk into the bright Iowa morning, leaving Clara Sterling alone with the smell of ink, lead, and the distant, subtle scent of turned earth.

Dawn broke over Black Hawk County in ribbons of melon pink and pale lavender, burning off the low river fog that clung to the bottoms along the Cedar River. By five-thirty, the roosters across the creek were in full chorus, and Clara Sterling was already on her knees in the patch of dark loam behind her small frame cottage, which sat adjacent to the back alley behind the printing shop.

She wore an old gray wool skirt dusted with dried dirt from seasons past, a faded chambray work shirt rolled up to her elbows, and a pair of stout leather work shoes tied with string. A hand cultivator lay beside her in the dirt, its steel tines polished bright from years of turning Iowa prairie soil. Clara believed in order. Her garden was laid out in crisp, rectangular beds bordered by river stones she had hauled up from the bank herself, row upon row of crisp radishes, early leaf lettuce, and sweet peas climbing neat bamboo tepees. But the small plot at the southern edge of the garden—the warm spot tucked against the whitewashed pine wall of her woodshed—lay cleared and open, its soil finely raked and waiting.

She pulled an tin pocket watch from her skirt pocket, checked the hands—five minutes to six—and let out a quiet, skeptical huff. Traveling salesmen were notorious for two things: grand promises and bad timing. They arrived when you were in the middle of set-up or eating dinner, and they were nowhere to be found when the goods delivered turned out to be inferior.

A sharp, rhythmic crunching sound on the gravel alleyway made her look up.

Thomas Vance was walking down the lane, stepping around the dried ruts left by milk wagons. He had traded his straw boater hat for an old linen cap pushed back on his forehead, and his crisp wool jacket was gone, replaced by a clean denim vest over a collarless work shirt. Slung over his shoulder by a thick hemp strap was a shallow wooden nursery crate, bound with copper wire and dripping slightly from a fresh watering.

He stopped at her wooden picket gate, lifted his thumb to the latch, and gave her a slight, polite nod. "Morning, Mrs. Sterling. Six o'clock on the nose, by my watch."

Clara stood up, wiping her earth-stained palms on her apron. "Punctuality is a virtue, Mr. Vance. It doesn't mean your tomatoes can handle an Iowa summer, but it means you can read a clock."

Thomas laughed—a short, genuine sound that rustled softly in the morning air—and unlatched the gate with his boot, stepping into the tidy garden enclosure. He set the crate down on a flat stone near the edge of the open bed with immense care, as if he were handling a tray of hand-cut crystal.

"See for yourself," Thomas said, stepping back to give her room. "Twelve starts. Brandywine strain, Chester County origin. Every one of them grown from seed saved by hand last autumn."

Clara knelt beside the wooden box, leaning in to inspect the offerings. The seedlings were roughly eight inches high, squat and thick-stemmed, without the spindly, pale leggy look of plants raised under crowded commercial glasshouse benches. Their leaves were unusually broad and smooth-edged—not the jagged, serrated leaves she usually associated with tomatoes, but flat, sturdy foliage resembling potato vines.

She reached out, gently cupping the stem of the nearest seedling between two ink-stained fingers. The plant felt cold, firm, and full of sap. When her fingers brushed against the leaves, the rich, pungent scent of green vine—sharp, oily, and intensely herbal—filled the cool air between them.

"Potato leaf foliage," Clara observed, her slate-gray eyes narrowing as she scrutinized the root balls wrapped neatly in damp moss and squares of old cotton feed sack. "Most folks around here plant the Earliana or the Ponies. They have thin, ragged leaves."

"The potato leaf is the mark of the old strain," Thomas explained, crouching down beside her on his heels. He picked up a handful of her garden dirt, squeezing it into a ball before letting it crumble through his fingers back onto the row. "This is fine soil you've got here. Good drainage, plenty of old leaf mold. You've been adding ash from the stove?"

"Oak and hickory ash from the kitchen range every winter," Clara replied absently, still studying the plants. "It cuts the acid in the soil. My father taught me that before he died."

"He was a smart man," Thomas said softly. "Tomatoes like a sweet bed, but they hate wet feet. If you put these six inches deep—deep enough to cover the first pair of leaf joints—they’ll throw out secondary roots along the buried stem. By July, they'll have a root system as deep as an oak sapling."

Clara looked up from the crate, catching Thomas’s gaze. He was closer than he had been yesterday, crouching right beside her in the dirt, smelling faintly of lye soap, crushed tomato leaves, and black coffee. There was no pretense in his eyes now, no slick pitch designed to slide an advertising contract across her oak counter. He looked at the earth with the quiet reverence of someone who understood what it took to pull life out of it.

She stood up quickly, brushing the dirt from her knees and clearing her throat. "I know how to plant a tomato, Mr. Vance."

Thomas stood up as well, his easy smile returning, though he kept his hands folded neatly behind his back. "I don't doubt it for a moment, Mrs. Sterling. But these are delicate guests. They've traveled by train from Cedar Rapids, and they aren't used to Black Hawk County hospitality yet."

"They'll get the same hospitality as everything else in this garden," Clara said, reaching for her spade. "Work hard or die. I don't give coddling to plants or people."

She stepped to the head of the prepared bed and drove the sharp iron edge of her hand spade into the black earth with an efficient, practiced thrust. She turned the soil, dug a small, square pit, and picked up the first seedling from the crate. With gentle, experienced hands, she peeled away the damp feed sack, fluffed the compressed white root tips at the base, set the plant deep into the cool dirt, and drew the dark soil back around it, pressing it down firmly with her thumbs.

Thomas stood by the gate, watching her work. There was an economy to her movements that he couldn't help but admire. Every motion was precise, calculated to save energy and time. She didn't hurry, but within ten minutes, six of the twelve Brandywine starts were lined up in a straight, even row, standing tall and green against the dark earth.

"You move like a woman with a deadline," Thomas remarked, leaning against the fence rail.

"I am a woman with three deadlines before noon," Clara said, not looking up as she set the seventh plant into its hole. "The Gazette goes to the pressman at two o'clock today. I have four pages of display ads to prove, two columns of grain market reports to set by hand, and three hundred billheads to print for the hardware store before the afternoon freight train pulls out."

"And yet you took twenty minutes at six in the morning to put twelve tomato plants in the ground," Thomas pointed out softly.

Clara stopped her spade mid-stroke. She looked at the row of fresh green stems, then turned her head toward him, her jaw set. "I took twenty minutes because if I don't test what you're selling, I'm just as bad as the traveling fakers who came before you. My name is on the masthead of the Gazette, Mr. Vance. When a farmer reads something in my paper, he spends his hard-earned money based on those letters. If I sell him six inches of copy promising a world-record crop, and his family goes into winter with empty cellar shelves, that's on my conscience."

Thomas’s expression sobered instantly. The playful spark in his blue eyes gave way to something deep and respectful. "I respect that, Mrs. Sterling. More than I can tell you. The country would be a sight better off if every catalog editor had a garden behind the shop and a conscience behind the desk."

Clara finished setting the last plant, scooped up a wooden bucket of river water she had set out the night before to warm in the sun, and carefully poured a steady stream around the base of each new stalk. The dry earth drank the water greedily, settling around the stems with a soft, bubbling sigh.

"There," Clara said, wiping her forehead with the back of her wrist, leaving a faint streak of dark soil near her hairline. "They are planted. Now we see if your Amish heirlooms are tough enough for Iowa weather."

"They'll do more than survive," Thomas said, stepping over to take the heavy wooden bucket from her hand before she could lift it again. He set it down by the rain barrel. "They'll thrive. But since you mentioned your morning deadlines, perhaps you'd let me walk with you to the front shop? I have the copy written for the specimen listings—just so you can see how I format the strain histories."

Clara gave him a keen, sideways look. "You don't give up easy, do you?"

"A seed salesman who gives up easy goes hungry, Mrs. Sterling," Thomas replied cheerfully, gesturing toward the back entrance of the printing office. "After you."

The interior of Sterling Farm Publications was cool and dark compared to the morning sun in the garden, but the quiet of the night had already been broken by the small hum of early preparation. Clara walked through the back loading doors, tying a clean, heavy linen apron over her dress and stepping up to the high composing stone in the center of the pressroom.

The smell of the shop was a physical presence—a bitter, rich mix of mineral spirits, heavy machinery grease, cotton paper rag, and the metallic bite of lead alloy. On the wide marble top of the imposing stone lay several steel chase frames, packed with hundreds of tiny, raised iron characters held tightly together by wooden furniture and metal wedges called quoins.

Thomas followed her inside, holding his breath for a moment as his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light. "It’s a serious operation you have here."

"It was my husband's operation," Clara said flatly, pulling a pair of thin leather arm-guards over her sleeves to protect them from ink. She picked up a metal quoin key from the table. "Frank bought the cylinder press second-hand from a paper in Dubuque back in 1912. He spent five years paying off the mortgage on the building. When he died, the bank suggested I sell the machinery to an outfit in Waterloo for scrap value and take a position as a clerk at the dry goods store."

Thomas looked at her, noting the quiet steel in her posture as she adjusted the tension on a chase frame. "I take it you didn't care for the bank's suggestion."

"I told the bank manager that if he wanted the press, he'd have to come crank it himself," she said, a faint, cold smile touching the corner of her lips. "I learned to set type when I was sixteen, working for my uncle in Marshalltown. Frank knew the business, but I knew the fonts. I set the type, I read the galley proofs, and I keep the books. The only thing Frank did that I couldn't do was lift the seventy-pound paper rolls onto the feed tray—and I hired a high school boy named Jimmy to do that after school for two dollars a week."

She stepped over to her tall sloped composing desk, where thousands of individual metal letters sat tucked into tiny compartments inside shallow wooden trays known as California job cases. Her right hand moved with blinding speed—a blur of instinct and muscle memory—dropping letters into her handheld composing stick: t-h-e, space, F-a-r-m-e-r-s, space, G-a-z-e-t-t-e.

Thomas stepped closer, careful to keep a respectful distance from her work area. From his vest pocket, he pulled a neatly folded sheet of thick cream-colored bond paper and laid it smoothly on the corner of the oak counter away from her type cases.

"That's the text I drafted," Thomas said quietly. "For the heirloom series. If the Brandywine proves out in August, this is the copy I'd like you to run in the spring catalog."

Clara paused, her composing stick suspended in mid-air. She turned her head, looked at the folded sheet, and then reached out with two fingers to unfold it.

The handwriting on the page was not the copperplate flourish of a clerk or the messy scrawl of a field hand. It was a firm, elegant italic script, executed with dark blue fountain pen ink. Clara’s eyes, trained by years of proofreading, scanned the lines automatically:

BRANDYWINE TOMATO (Original Strain): A legendary heirloom of the Chester County, Pennsylvania Dutch, cultivated continuously since 1885. Foliage is heavy, potato-leafed, offering superior sun protection to the developing fruit. Produce yields large, globe-shaped beefsteaks of a deep, purplish-pink hue. Flesh is solid, seed cavities small, carrying a rich, complex balance of sugars and acids lost to modern commercial selections. Requires robust staking and generous soil nourishment. Maturity: 80 days from transplant.

Clara read the paragraph twice. She looked for typographical errors, awkward phrasing, or the exaggerated puffery common to seed catalogs—words like miraculous, unbeatable, or giant. There were none. The description was clean, precise, and practical. It told the gardener what the plant was, where it came from, what it needed, and how long it would take.

"You wrote this yourself?" she asked, looking up at him over the edge of the paper.

"Every word," Thomas said. "I don't like commercial broadsheets any more than you do, Mrs. Sterling. Most catalogs promise the world and deliver turnips. I prefer to tell a farmer exactly what he's putting into his dirt. If a crop needs staking, he ought to know it before he buys the seed, not after his vines are rotting on the ground in a July thunderstorm."

Clara refolded the sheet with deliberate care and laid it back on the counter. "It’s good copy, Mr. Vance. Plain spoken. But good copy doesn't pay for newsprint. Paper has gone up twelve percent since January. The mills in Wisconsin are charging eight dollars a roll, and the railroad charges another dollar fifty for freight to the depot. If I put two columns of this in my spring index, it costs me real money."

"And if those two columns bring you two hundred new mail-order subscribers from across the river?" Thomas countered softly, taking a half-step toward the counter. "Modern farmers are tired of buying seed that fails them, Mrs. Sterling. They want truth. You give them truth printed on good paper, and they'll buy your index every year."

Clara met his gaze. The shop was quiet save for the distant clatter of a coal wagon passing in the alley outside and the soft ticking of the Regulator clock on the back wall. For a long moment, neither of them spoke. She could see the steady confidence in his expression—not the arrogant pushiness of a road peddler, but the settled certainty of a man who knew his craft as thoroughly as she knew hers.

"We'll see," Clara said, turning back to her type case, her fingers instantly resuming their rhythmic, click-clack dance as metal letters fell into the brass stick. "August is two months away. A lot can happen between now and the first harvest. We could get a dry spell that bakes the ground to brick, or a hail storm off the river that cuts those vines to ribbons."

"Then we'll pray for rain and hold off the hail," Thomas said, taking his linen cap from his pocket and settling it back on his head. He walked to the screen door, pausing with his hand on the wooden frame. "I'll be down at the old Miller place for the next two weeks setting up my seed frames. If you need help with those heavy paper rolls before your high school boy shows up, you know where to find me."

Clara didn't look up from her type tray, but her fingers slowed for a fraction of a second. "I can handle my own paper rolls, Mr. Vance."

"I don't doubt it for a second, Mrs. Sterling," Thomas said with a faint smile. "Good day to you."

The screen door slapped shut behind him with a sharp thwack, leaving Clara alone once more in the cool, ink-scented air of the shop. She stood at the composing desk for a long time, listening to the fading sound of his footsteps on the boardwalk outside.

Then she looked down at her composing stick, turned to the high counter, and picked up Thomas’s neatly written sheet of paper once more, tucking it carefully into the top drawer of her desk alongside her favorite proofs.