Garrett Whitter

Garrett learned cobbling from his own father on the same street where his shop now stands, a narrow building on Cradle Row that's housed three generations of Whitter cobblers. He took over the workshop in his early twenties after his father's hands grew too stiff for fine stitching, and ran it alone, with help from Elsa on the books, for the rest of his life.

Garrett met Elsa when she brought in a basket of mending in exchange for resoling her father's boots, an arrangement that turned into a standing trade, then into long evenings talking over the workbench, then into a marriage that the whole street agreed was "obvious to everyone but the two of them." They lived above the shop together from then on.

Garrett was never entirely sure what to make of the day a merchant left his shop loudly insisting David had cost him three silver by "finding problems that weren't there," only for half the street to later agree the boy had been right. He was proud of David in a way he never quite found words for, and quietly started setting aside a little extra coin "for whatever the lad ends up needing," without telling anyone, including David.

On Heatwave 22, 1306, Garrett was found dead above the Cradle Row workshop alongside Elsa and David, killed by an unknown assailant whose method of entry has never been determined. Every door and window in the building was found locked and barred from the inside, with no sign of forced entry anywhere on the premises, meaning that whoever committed the killings somehow left the sealed building without a trace of how. Neighbors who knew Garrett's habits insist he never once forgot to bar the door at night, which has done nothing to make the mystery any less unsettling. The investigation remains open, and Cradle Row has been noticeably quieter since.

Garrett never learned who killed him, or how they had slipped past a shop he would have sworn on his own hands was locked tight. He learned, instead, what it was to wake from nothing at all into his own bed above the workshop, Elsa's voice already calling David's name in the next room with a note of panic that cracked halfway into disbelieving joy. He lay still for a moment, testing the strange sensation of breath in his chest the way he'd test the give of a strap, out of old habit, before he understood there was nothing wrong to find. Whatever had happened to Cradle Row while he was gone, the shop was standing, his family was breathing, and that was accounting enough for a man who had never much cared for explanations that did not change the outcome.

He found Elsa and David already together when he made it to the front room, the three of them meeting in the middle of it in a tangle that undid every ounce of the steady reserve Garrett usually kept close. He held on longer than he meant to. Word came later, through the street and then through half of Goodberry, that this was the Second Pulse, some wave out of Goldenleaf 7 that had swept the whole town and beyond it, restoring what a bad season had taken. Garrett never much cared for theory. He cared that the door was locked, that his family was on the other side of it, and that this time, whatever had come for them in the night, it had not been allowed to keep them.

Garrett wanted, more than anything, for the Whitter name on a shop sign to keep meaning something: fair prices, honest work, and shoes that last, even as neighboring shops cut corners around him. Though he never said it aloud, he had come to suspect that David's future did not lie at a cobbler's bench, and he kept quietly setting coins aside while he searched for a way to say so that would not sound like rejection. And some part of him never stopped hoping the Cradle Row shop might pass to a fourth generation of Whitters, even if it was not David, which is why he had begun, very quietly, taking on the occasional local kid as an after-school helper, "just to see."

On Thawbloom 12, 1307, Garrett died of a sudden heart attack. After the locked shop, the unknown hand that had already taken him once, and the Second Pulse that had returned him to his family, it was his own heart that finally gave out, without warning and with no one to blame. The Second Pulse had given him just over seven months back, and he spent them the way he had spent the rest of his life: at his workbench on Cradle Row, doing the stitch right, with Elsa and David close by. This time, there was no second pulse.