Read the passage. The last ink stone The workshop occupied a narrow storefront at the crooked end of Warren Street, where the afternoon light arrived late and left early. For fifty-one years, Grandfather Eli had carved name seals there, transforming rectangular blocks of soapstone into small monuments that pressed a person's name into vermilion ink. Cora had grown up amid the papery smell of that room, though she had never once believed the work would someday be handed to her. Now she was seventeen, and the question hung in the shop like the dust that drifted through the slanted window. Her grandfather's hands had begun to tremble, an unsteadiness he refused to name aloud. When he gripped the carving knife, the blade wandered slightly, and the delicate strokes that had once flowed from his fingers now demanded a concentration that visibly exhausted him. "A seal is a promise," he told her that Saturday, setting a fresh stone before her on the worn cushion. "When someone stamps their name, they are saying they stand behind their words. Our job is to make that promise beautiful enough to be worthy of them." He nudged the smallest chisel toward her, and Cora felt the familiar pull of obligation tighten in her chest. She had been accepted into an engineering program two states away, a future her parents described as sensible and secure. The seal-carving trade, by contrast, seemed to belong to a vanishing century. Fewer customers arrived each year, and most who did wanted their names printed by machines that could produce a hundred identical stamps before Eli finished a single one by hand. "Try the horizontal stroke first," he instructed, guiding her wrist without quite touching it. "Patience is the only tool that never dulls." Cora pressed the blade into the soapstone, and a thin curl of gray dust rose and settled on the bench. The line she cut was crooked, embarrassingly so, and she set the knife down with a frustrated sigh. Eli only smiled, the wrinkles around his eyes deepening into a map she had memorized a