He hears the knock at 08:55.

Not the fence, not the gap — the gate. The actual gate, the bolt-latch at the perimeter, which requires someone to walk around the fence line to the access point, find the handle, and knock. It is not a complicated thing. He has just never heard anyone do it.

He sets down his trowel. Wipes his hands on the front of his trousers, which are already past saving. He walks the length of the yard to the gate.

He stands at it for a moment.

Then he opens it.

She is standing in the lane outside. Same coat. Same careful posture. She is looking at him with an expression he cannot immediately classify — not quite uncertainty, not quite resolve. Something in between, the face of someone who has decided to do something and is now doing it and has not yet decided what they think about that.

He steps back from the gate without saying anything.

She steps through.

He latches the gate behind her. They stand in the yard.

“I don’t want to be in the way,” she says.

“You won’t be,” he says.

He picks up his trowel and goes back to the bed he was working on. He does not look at her. After a moment, he hears her footsteps on the gravel — careful, measured — and then she stops moving, and he can feel that she is looking at something, though he doesn’t know what.

“How long?” she asks.

“Seven years,” he says. “This section. That bed there went in first — the beetroots — because I had seeds for it. The rest came later, as I worked out what the soil would hold.”

Silence.

“You’ve been here seven years,” she says. The tone is not quite a question.

“Since 2040.”

She is quiet for a while. He works the row.

“The algorithm,” she says, finally. “The resource allocation model. I found your name. The 2036 specification.”

“I wrote it,” he says. “The first version.”

“2036.”

“Yes.”

Another silence. Longer.

“And then you came here,” she says.

He does not answer immediately. He is working on a section of compacted soil, loosening it with the fork, and the work requires attention. The soil here has clay in it, which clings and resists and requires patience.

“I retired,” he says. “And then I came here.”

She doesn’t say anything else for a while.

He reaches the end of the row. Starts the next.

The heron does not appear today. The gantry stands empty above the rose, which has moved another thirty centimetres since last week and seems to have developed opinions about the eastern strut.

“The rose,” she says. “What kind is it?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “I found it. Someone had discarded it. I planted it without reading the label.”

She laughs. It is a short, surprised sound, not quite what he expected.

“That’s reckless,” she says.

“Possibly,” he says. “It seems to be doing well regardless.”