The final field asked for wishes granted to herself, and the column, across twenty-three hundred years of submissions, held nothing.
Her grandson's first coding project had a syntax error on line seven, and she sat beside him for three hours not fixing it, asking questions instead, until he found it himself.
None of them said where they were when they watched it.
She died on February twenty-second, having forgotten by then that she had ever had a son, which meant the last eight months of Sundays had been, to her, visits from a very kind stranger.
Neither of them mentioned it, which was how they'd always preferred to agree.
What they didn't know was that he'd lost his last forty deliberately, one loss at a time, choosing men who needed the purse more than he needed another victory.
She'd started the project the year her daughter came out, so there would always be a map that said here is where you belong.
She kept count not out of pride but because she'd read once that the worst thing was to die alone and she wanted to know how many times she'd made that not true.
He came back three days later with a drawing the dragon had made of the two of them fishing, which the knight's mother framed and hung above the fireplace.
The revenue agents had quotas, which is why Officer Dan had been looking the other way for twenty-three years, and why his pension was very, very small.
When the boy with the nightmares started talking to it instead of screaming, it didn't know what to do, so it just listened, which turned out to be enough.
But she kept a logbook no one knew about, tracking every sailor she'd helped home, and the margins were full of small notes: safe, made it, daughter born, still fishing.
Her son changed the locks twice before her doctor explained, very gently, that the man was him.
By the third week he'd stopped writing notes and started learning their names, because the woman with the fever had asked him to stay a little longer and he realized no one had asked him for anything in years.