The south bed is the warmest. It faces the low brick wall of the old signal building, which holds heat through the morning and releases it in the afternoon in a specific, measurable way. He has been tracking it for seven years. The difference is three degrees, sometimes four, which is the margin between what lives and what doesn’t.

He makes the rows with a dibber — a sharpened stick, the handle worn smooth — pressing evenly spaced holes into the soil, two centimetres deep. The packet says one centimetre. He has learned, through failure, that one centimetre is not enough.

He works slowly. Sweet peas want a long root run. He has chosen the south bed for this reason, and also because the south bed has the best drainage, and also because it is the farthest point in the yard from the gate, which is a fact he is being careful not to attach meaning to.

He drops a seed into each hole. They are wrinkled, dark, smaller than he remembered. He presses the soil back over them with two fingers, gently, the way you close something.

He has been thinking about what it means to plant something you know will not survive the year.

It is not sad, exactly. Everything in this garden has an end date — the kale, the brassicas, the sorrel that dies to the ground each autumn and returns, stubbornly, in March. He has never found this unbearable. The garden works in cycles, not conclusions.

But sweet peas are different. Sweet peas flower in June and July and August, and by September they begin to thin, and by November there is nothing. Not roots, not crowns, not anything. They will not be here next spring. Whatever this is — this packet, this gesture, this thing he has not yet named — it has an end built in.

He finishes the row and sits back on his heels.

On the gantry, the rose. Above the rose, sky. The city moving somewhere beyond the perimeter wall with its usual indifference to what happens inside it.

He thinks about the model he wrote. He thinks about this specific and peculiar habit: planting things whose ending is not in question, tending them anyway, attending to the interim as if the interim is the point.

Perhaps it is.

He covers the last hole. Presses the soil even. Stands up slowly, the way he stands up these days, feeling the morning in his back.

He does not know if she will come back.

He plants the seeds anyway.

That is also, he thinks, a kind of answer.