But she picked up a sanding block from the workbench. Held it out.

Elena had not spoken to her sister Mira in four years. The silence had started over something small—a misplaced heirloom, a forgotten birthday—and calcified into something vast and immovable, a glacier between their houses on opposite sides of the same Chicago neighborhood.

Neither of them said hello.

She heard footsteps on the gravel.

They stood in silence, the ghost of their father between them. Then Mira reached into her coat pocket and pulled out a folded paper—yellowed, identical to the one on the wall. “He gave me this five years ago. The day we stopped speaking. He said, ‘When you’re ready, she’ll be ready.’”

It wasn’t a question.

They still had miles to go. But they were moving. And that, after all, was the point.

They didn’t speak about the past. Not that day. But as the sun set and the first stars pricked the Chicago sky, two women who had forgotten how to be sisters began, in silence, to sand a hull that might one day float.

But now their father was dying.