She typed numbers learned from three gas-station receipts, a GPS breadcrumb from an old photo, and the faded memory of that road where the cornfields bent like a chorus. The calculator did its work: miles, fuel economy, cost per mile, CO2 estimate. Each result arrived with quiet precision—useful facts, but Mara found them suddenly resonant. The cost-per-mile readout, a modest two digits, felt less like accounting and more like a map of small choices: how often she stopped, whether she’d idled at red lights, the time she took the scenic county road.