Mara almost walked past it. The chair leaned awkwardly against the dumpster at the end of the street, one leg broken clean through, its seat frayed and sagging. A note taped to the backrest read: “Free – broken.” Her first instinct was to keep walking. She had a perfectly good chair at home, one of those sleek metal ones from the flat-pack store. But something about this chair stopped her—maybe the curve of the armrest, softened by years of touch, or the way the wood still glowed beneath the ...