When he left—no one could say when, exactly—he left like a low tide: a slow reveal of what had been held beneath the surface. He left behind small things: a journal of sketches, a sack of spare keys, a list of people who owed each other immortal small courtesies. He left behind a town that had learned to notice. The people who had once been strangers to one another now found themselves bound by an architecture of attention: meetings of neighbors over repaired fences, an annual lamp festival that drew sailors who had once passed the town without a glance, a repaired radio that now carried voices from distant places and brought them home.