“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

Risto listened. He had repaired a lot of things, but he recognized the specific geometry of grief that came from being reshaped by rumor. It was a jagged, concrete kind of hurt, not the clean break of a snapped string.

“I am,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron out of reflex and, perhaps, because manners were another kind of repair.

“It’s ruined,” Mira said. Her fingers trembled as she pushed the clipping toward him. “My father… people started treating him differently after that. He’d sit in the square and strangers would count his shoes. They thought they could buy his silence or his charity. It broke him. They broke him.”

He blinked. “Depends on what needs fixing.”

One evening a woman in a rain-splattered coat pushed open the door and stood framed in the haloed light. She was younger than he expected and carried a chipped suitcase the color of old postcards.