The map showed a bench beyond the last garden wall. Finn followed it through Briarward and found a bramble patch. His aunt had drawn the map for a friend shortly before she died. He wondered whether the friend ever found the place.
A groundskeeper recognized the path. The bench had been moved after a storm weakened the wall. Its replacement stood beside the library, bearing no inscription. In the maintenance file, a request from Finn's aunt asked for somewhere her friend could rest halfway up the hill.
The friend remembered the bench but not the map. She had stopped there during walks with Finn's aunt, who pretended to need the rest herself. The pretense had allowed both women to sit without making a public arrangement out of illness.
Finn sent her a photograph of the bench in its new location. She asked him to meet her there rather than deliver it to her home. He brought the map, and she corrected the final turn in pencil. It became useful again, guiding him toward a conversation instead of toward an object no longer where the drawing promised.