He has been thinking about how to say it.

Not whether to say it — that question settled itself sometime between the seed packet and the gate, without him quite noticing. What he has been considering is the form. The right weight of words. The difference between confession and statement of fact, which is sometimes nothing and sometimes everything.

She arrives at 09:10. He is at the far end of the yard, checking the temperature gauge on the cold frame. He hears the gate, hears her footsteps on the gravel — she has learned, without being told, to come in through the gate rather than the fence gap — and he does not look up until he has finished reading the gauge and written the number in the notebook he keeps in his left coat pocket.

Three and a half degrees. Within range.

He replaces the notebook.

“The cold frame,” she says. She has been cataloguing things. He has noticed this about her — the quiet inventory she takes, the way her eyes move. A professional habit, probably. Or something older.

“The seedlings can’t go out until the last frost,” he says. “I’m guessing mid-April. Could be wrong.”

She nods.

They work in silence for a while — he on the cold frame, adjusting the hinge that sticks; she moving around the yard with the careful pace of someone who has decided not to be in the way and is learning how.

He sets down the screwdriver.

“The model I wrote,” he says. He does not look at her. “The first version — 2036 — it was a resource allocation tool. It was designed to optimize the distribution of maintenance funding across city infrastructure. The inputs were usage data, demographic projections, cost-benefit ratios.”

She is still.

“It was a good model,” he says. “It did what it was designed to do. The problem is that what it was designed to do was make decisions based on economic productivity, and when you do that at scale, over time, you are not making neutral decisions. You are deciding which places are worth maintaining and which are not.”

He picks up the screwdriver again. Looks at it.

“I understood this,” he says. “I understood it when I was writing it. I wrote it anyway. I told myself it was a tool, not a policy — that the policy decisions were someone else’s to make.” He sets the screwdriver down again. “By the time I understood that was wrong, the model had been expanded and integrated and was running eleven districts. I was no longer involved.”

Silence.

“Did you try to stop it?” she asks.

He looks at her.

“I wrote a report,” he says. “Two reports. I made a formal objection in a committee meeting in 2038, which is documented in the minutes as a ‘technical concern, noted.’ And then I retired. At sixty-two — early, by any normal measure — and I told myself I had earned it, that I had done what I could.”

He picks up his trowel.

“I had not done what I could,” he says. “I had done what was comfortable.”

She says nothing. He is grateful for that. Some things don’t need a response. They need to be said, and received, and let alone.

He goes back to work.

The cold frame hinge holds.