Geda has the compact, steady presence of someone accustomed to carrying awkward loads through crowded streets. Her brown skin is dusted with pale flour at the cuffs and collar, and her dark hair is combed into close, precise waves that she smooths back into place whenever she is thinking. Her coat is a size too large, carefully patched at the elbows, but she has polished the brass buttons until they catch the light. She walks with a measured, heel-first tread, then pivots with surprising speed when a customer calls. The unexpected detail is a tiny, meticulously maintained collection of painted wooden songbirds pinned inside her coat, hidden from customers but visible when she reaches for something.

Geda is generous with food and labor but guarded with her own needs. She can be brisk and wry when dealing with customers, patient when teaching a child, and unexpectedly sharp with family when she feels excluded. Under pressure she becomes organized rather than calm, making lists and assigning tasks until her fear has somewhere to go.

Geda is Thessa's older sister, and for years the two learned to read their mother's moods by the sound of her key in the door. Their mother, Dima, rented a single narrow room above a shuttered cobbler's shop and earned her living mending clothes, taking in errands, and writing letters for neighbors who could not. When Geda was seventeen, a fever swept their block. Their mother spent her savings on medicine for a neighbor's child, then hid the cost from her daughters by claiming a customer had paid late. Geda found the receipt and, furious at the sacrifice, took a job delivering parcels to help keep the room. That argument changed their relationship: she stopped mistaking her mother's generosity for carelessness, but never stopped wishing Dima had let her help sooner. Now Dima is dead, leaving the sisters the room's remaining rent and a box of letters neither has had the courage to sort with the other. Geda has been paying the rent from her work at a bakery and delaying the landlord, while Thessa's own life keeps pulling her elsewhere. Geda wants the letters opened together, but fears they will reveal that their mother entrusted one daughter with a truth she withheld from the other.