The oldest repair note had a scorch mark across its date.
Vivienne held it under the lodging lamp and remembered why the mark was there. An earlier workshop incident. A hot casing, a scorched corner, Barnaby objecting that the book beneath him had suffered worse than he had.
The later notes were less orderly.
After Nerin’s death, she had kept the household moving through tasks she now remembered mainly by what interrupted them. A replacement in the voice assembly. A damaged joint. Memory material preserved rather than forced back into service.
Not an untouched original. Not a neat sequence prepared for a tribunal.
Barnaby waited beside the open maintenance case.
“Which pages concern me?”
She gathered the relevant sheets and almost began summarizing them.
