A Hundred Years of Hands

A cathedral teaches a man to think in centuries. No one who lays the first stone lives to see the roof finished. The work is never done — only handed on.For sixty years Tom Hale gave his hands to Aldermere Cathedral. As a half-orphaned boy, he was apprenticed to the formidable Master Crale, who taught him to read stone the way other men read faces. As an old master mason, he risked everything to save the failing Lantern tower. But the long patience that made him great in stone cost him the rest: the glass-painter he loved and never asked, certain there would always be time; the gifted apprentice he failed in silence after the fall.Now eighty-one, a lifetime of dust in his lungs, Tom faces a hurried young conservator who needs to learn what only he still knows. And so he tells it at last — the master, the woman, the boy, the fall, and the carving he made high in the dark where no living eye will ever find it.A luminous novel about craft, love, regret, and the quiet inheritance we leave behind.Begin Tom's story today.