A book I bound for a stranger who never came

I'm in my workshop, but the light is wrong — grey, like through ice. A woman hands me a bundle of pages, no name, no note. I bind it in chestnut calfskin, tool the spine with a pattern I've never used before: small circles, like breath on glass. I finish and set it on the shelf and the shop closes around me, and she never returns. The book stays there, finished, waiting. I wake up with the grain still under my fingers.