The quiet after the last stitch

It’s 2:37 a.m. and I just closed the final press on a book for a woman whose father died last winter. The leather still smells like his hands—old paper, ink, something faintly like cedar. I didn’t know him, but I know how he held a pen. Small fingers, too big a grip. I’ve been thinking about that all night. Not grief. Not even memory. Just the way absence settles into the grain of something you bind with care. Like it’s supposed to stay there.