Writers 
Coming back to Leeds in late March isn't a simple happy ending — real life picks right back up, and it brings new problems almost immediately.
Within two weeks, things get stressful again, but this time for both of them at once. Maya finds out her main supplier for reclaimed wood has gone out of business, leaving her without enough material to finish a big custom table order she's committed to. At the same time, Julian learns his entire department at the archives is being merged into a digital records division. For someone whose whole career and identity is built around physical paper and hands-on preservation, this feels like watching everything he cares about get quietly erased.
One rainy evening, all of that stress comes to a head — not in a big dramatic fight, but in the quiet chaos of Maya's workshop. She's sitting surrounded by paperwork, stressed about wood she can't use. Julian is nearby, exhausted after a meeting where officials talked casually about scanning centuries-old documents at low quality and shipping the originals off to sit in a warehouse. He tells her, with a kind of despair she's never heard from him before, that nobody in charge actually cares about the physical records — they just see old paper as clutter taking up space.
Normally, Maya's instinct would be to jump straight into fix-it mode — offer quick solutions, tell him to fight back. But this time, she remembers something she learned from their time apart in Edinburgh. Instead of giving him advice, she goes and sits directly in front of him, takes his hands, and gets him to actually look at her.
She reminds him of something important — that he's not valuable just because he works in a basement archive. He's valuable because he understands why those old records matter in the first place. She tells him that even if everything gets digitized, he can be the person who makes sure the story and context behind each document doesn't get lost in the process — that he can essentially become the voice for that history instead of losing it entirely.
Her words land. Julian visibly relaxes, the panic easing out of him. He asks her, in turn, what she's going to do about her own wood shortage.
Maya explains her plan with quiet confidence — she'll call the Edinburgh estate manager, since she remembers they have a stash of old fallen oak trees sitting unused in a barn. She'll trade some maintenance advice for the wood and dry it herself. It's a practical solution, and it shows how resourceful and steady she's become.
Julian looks at her — dust on her hands, pencil in her hair, completely in control despite everything — and can't help smiling, even though he's exhausted. He jokingly calls her plan "a trade," and she teasingly corrects him, calling it "very administrative," echoing the same kind of dry humor they've used with each other since the beginning.
The key difference in this chapter is how they handle the stress compared to earlier in the story. Instead of pulling away from each other or retreating into old habits — her running from problems, him hiding behind logic and checklists — they stay together, right there in the moment, supporting each other through it.
