He does not know her name.

He notices this on Wednesday morning while he is watering the cold frame seedlings, the ones that are still too small to be anything definite but have committed to a direction. He has been coming to the garden for seven years and she has been coming to the garden for ten days and he does not know her name.

It seems late to ask. It is probably not late to ask.

She arrives at 08:50, which he has noticed is her usual time, slightly earlier than the first visits. She has adjusted to the rhythm of the place — coming in through the gate without hesitation, moving through the yard with the confidence of someone who has learned where she can go without disturbing anything.

He waits until they are both working — him at the right-side compost bin; her on the south bed, where she crouches most mornings without being asked to, checking the surface of the soil with the attention of someone monitoring something she cannot see but does not want to miss.

“What do they call you?” he asks.

She looks up.

“Mara,” she says.

He nods. Turns the compost.

“Elias,” he says.

She holds his name in a moment, considering it.

“Elias,” she repeats, as if to confirm it.

“Yes.”

He turns the compost. It is good now — dark and finished, smelling right. He will use it in the next bed, and the garden will be better for it.

“Elias,” she says again, quietly, not to him. As if she is placing it somewhere.

He does not ask her last name. She does not ask his. Some things can wait. Some things can stay in the form they’ve been working in — provisional, first-name, built on what’s actually here rather than on everything that comes attached to a full name.

“I found something,” she says. She has been working up to this. He can hear it in the way she says it — deliberate, from the front of something she’s decided.

“Tell me,” he says.

She does.

He listens without interrupting. He turns the compost and listens, and when she finishes he takes a moment to understand what he already knew.

“Zone Viability Assessment,” he says.

“Yes.”

“I know what that is.”

She is quiet.

“I wrote the protocol,” he says. “In 2034. Two years before the allocation model. The ZVA was the diagnostic tool — the thing that told the model which zones were candidates for reduced maintenance.” He pauses. “I thought it would be used for triage. Identifying the places that needed the most support.”

He sets down the fork.

“I was wrong about that,” he says. “Among other things.”

The city makes its river sound. Above the perimeter wall, pigeons negotiate the cornice of the signal building.

“What does it mean,” she says, “for this place.”

He looks at the yard. The beds, the gantry, the rose moving along the eastern strut. The south bed where she crouches and the seeds don’t know yet what’s coming.

“It means someone has already decided this place isn’t worth the cost of maintaining,” he says.

He picks up the fork again.

“They haven’t decided what to do about it yet,” he says. “That’s the secondary review. We have time.”

He says we. He doesn’t correct it. She doesn’t comment on it.

They go back to work.