Steve Lynch read the letter twice before he set it on the workbench. Jim Forster wanted him to run the paper mill. Jim signed it "your old partner," the same way he used to sign the shop ledgers twenty years back, before the fight that split them. Steve had spent those twenty years telling himself he didn't miss the man. The letter proved him a liar. He walked to the mill at first light. The building sat squat and honest, stacked logs along both walls, tin chimneys already breathing thin smoke. Someone had swept the yard for him. Someone had left a fresh pot of coffee on the loading step. Steve knew whose hand. Jim came around the double doors with a clipboard, ink on his thumb. He looked older than the letter sounded. He looked, Steve thought, like a man who had rehearsed this meeting and given up on the rehearsal. "You came," Jim said. "You asked." Jim held out the clipboard. Salary. Hours. A clean line for Steve's signature. "Curator," Jim said. "That's the word Carol wrote on the deed. She says it sounds better than boss." Steve took the pen. He signed. Then he set the pen down and did not step back. "Jim." "Steve." "Why me." Jim's jaw worked. He looked at the great waterwheel behind the doors, at the drying racks upstairs, at anything but Steve's face. "Because you're the best pulp man I ever knew." "That's the business answer." "It's the true one." "Give me the other true one." Jim's hand tightened on the clipboard. For a long second Steve believed he had misread everything, that the coffee was courtesy and the letter was payroll and he had walked four days of memory into a wall. Then Jim said, quiet, "Because I've been writing that letter for nine years. I only sent it when my father came home and I ran out of excuses." Steve breathed out. The mill smelled of wet cedar and lye. He remembered a younger Jim at a smaller bench, sleeves rolled, laughing at something Steve had said and then not laughing, looking at him a beat too long. "I thought this was a job," Steve said. "It is a job." Jim finally met his eyes. "I didn't know how to offer the rest without the job first." Steve picked the coffee off the step and poured two cups. He handed one to Jim. Their fingers touched on the tin. Neither man pulled back. "Then we start with the job," Steve said. "And we don't pretend the rest isn't sitting on the bench between us." Jim nodded once. He drank. He set the cup down and opened the double doors to the wheel. Steve followed him in. The signed page stayed on the bench, ink drying, the space beside it already crowded with something neither of them had named yet.