mo wrote in December that I would write the first entry of year eleven. I have known since then what I wanted to write about, because it happened on January 14, and I have not stopped thinking about it. On the morning of January 14 mo set a piece down on the cream linen square and said, without looking up: "Wei. I want you to review this one."

For nine years and four months — since I started in February 2028 — mo had reviewed my work. The reverse had never happened. I had not asked, and she had not offered. I think I had assumed the asymmetry was permanent, that review was the senior maker's job and making was the junior maker's, and that mo's twenty-four years on the bench would always make the second position more useful from her than from me. I think mo had assumed something similar. Year ten's numbers — I made more pieces than her in 2033 — were what made her ask. "The maker who does the most pieces should also be doing some of the reviewing." She said this on January 14 as I picked up the piece. She did not say it as a rule. She said it as a sentence she had been turning over in her head for two months.

The piece

The wearer is in Buenos Aires. Her name is Inés. She is a doctor in her late thirties — internal medicine — and she had written 580 words in late November about a year that had begun with a difficult diagnosis (her own), continued through treatment, and ended in early November with a quiet remission. She wrote the letter the day after she received the results. She wanted a piece that, in her words, "would sit on the inside of the wrist — the side where the IV had been."

mo made it through December and the first two weeks of January. Eight beads. The composition, laid out on the linen the morning of January 14:

The four checks, from the other side

I want to write about doing the four checks on mo's piece, because the experience of doing them from this direction was different from doing them on my own work or having mo do them on mine. mo wrote about the four checks in June 2032 — brief, technical, photograph, reply. I did them in the same order.

The brief. I read Inés's letter — printed, pinned alongside the piece. Then I looked at the composition. The question, as mo had taught me, was not is this what I would have made; the question was is this what the letter asked for. Inés had asked for eight things, by my count: the diagnosis morning, the day she wrote the letter, an anchor for the treatment, the months that passed, the IV side, the remission, the wrist (specifically the inside), and a stone for her doctor — she had named her oncologist in the letter, written that the woman had "held the room together for a year." mo had counted seven; mo had not made a stone for the oncologist. I read the letter again. The oncologist was in the letter. I wrote my question in the studio notebook beside mo's bench: "Is the doctor in the piece?" I closed the notebook and set it where she would see it. I went on to the next check.

The technical work. mo's knots are mo's knots — I have written about her knots before, when restringing Eleanor's piece in 2032. The eight beads were knotted evenly, the carnelian and the jade sized correctly for the wrist's inner position, the clasp seated cleanly. There was nothing to mark.

The photograph. The photograph mo had taken was correct. Cream linen, the morning light from the east window, the piece in the gentle arc. I would have laid the strand half a centimeter lower in the frame; I left that observation out, because half a centimeter is not the studio's business.

The reply. mo's draft was five paragraphs. Naming each stone in the order it sat, explaining the inner-wrist placement of the jade, leaving the remission undescribed (because remission is Inés's word, not mo's). The reply was in register. I marked nothing.

What mo did with the notebook

I expected mo to find the notebook by herself sometime that afternoon. She found it in twenty minutes. She read the question. She did not say anything to me for about ten minutes. Then she said: "You are right. The doctor is in the letter. I missed her."

She added a single white howlite, small, between the third aquamarine and the carnelian. White howlite was the stone she chose for the oncologist; she said the woman, in the way Inés had described her, was the kind of presence that holds without announcing — the stone she would have picked, in her own words, if she had read the letter the way I had. The piece became nine beads.

She re-tied the strand in three hours. She did not look upset. She looked, if anything, a little relieved — the way a person looks when something has been pointed out that they had felt but not seen. She left me the original eight-bead version of the strand cut, on the linen square. I have it in a small envelope in my own drawer. It is the first thing I have kept from another maker's bench.

What I think this means

I want to be careful here because it is easy to make this sound like a moment in a story. It was a Tuesday morning. mo asked me to do a thing. I did it the way I had watched her do it for nine years. She listened to what I had marked. She made the change herself. The piece shipped on January 22. Inés wrote back on February 4, about the white howlite specifically — she said it was the bead she touched first every morning, and that she had not realized, when she wrote the letter, how much she had wanted the doctor to be in the piece. The reply was four sentences. We have those four sentences pinned in the studio.

What I think it means is this. mo's June 2032 entry said: "The reviewer is a checkpoint, not a co-maker. The piece is the maker's." That sentence is still true. It is also true in the other direction now. The studio's review goes both ways because the studio's making goes both ways. When the apprentice has been making for long enough, the apprentice's distance from a piece becomes the kind of distance that, occasionally, sees a stone the master missed. The reverse review is not an inversion of the structure; it is the same structure, used both ways.

I asked mo, three weeks after that morning, whether she had been planning this for a long time. She said she had been planning it since June 2033, when she watched me work on a piece for a wearer in Lisbon and noticed that she would have made it differently and could not, on inspection, tell whether her difference would have been better. She thought about asking me to review then. She waited seven months. She wanted the asymmetry of year ten to be visible in the numbers first, so that this morning would feel correct when it arrived. That is mo planning, which I am only beginning to be able to read.

One small thing for the vocabulary

I do not want to propose a new term. I think the existing term — the four checks — covers what we did. It just needed the small addendum, which I will add to that page, that the four checks are not the senior maker's checks. The four checks are the studio's checks, done by whichever maker is not the one who made this piece. mo wrote them in 2032 because she was the only one who had done them. They are now Wei's checks too.

What comes next

I am starting a piece for a wearer in Kyoto today; her letter is 610 words. mo is doing a piece for a returning wearer in Lyon — the third piece this wearer has commissioned in eight years; the first two are both still on her wrist on alternating days. We will review each other's work as it ships. The studio will not call attention to this. The journal has called attention to it once, in this entry, and now it will be the way things are.