“The laws of the office change with every election,” he interrupted gently. “But the law of the well is older. It says: Here, someone once bent down to drink. Here, a mother washed her child’s face. Here, two lovers dropped a coin and made a wish. You cannot fill that in with gravel and cement.”

The well would remain. The root would hold. The heart would grow.

“What do I tell them?” she asked.

Ana knew she would find him at the well.

“Bunicule, the laws—”

She looked at the book in his hands. The cover was faded, the spine cracked. Dumitru Matcovschi’s face, stern and kind, stared out from the back. Her grandfather had carried this book through the last years of the Soviet Union, through the reawakening of the language, through the dusty days of independence and the hungry winter that followed.

Nicolae did not look up. He turned a page, though his eyes were closed.

Longing is not an illness. Longing is a root… The more you cut from the branch, the more the heart grows…