She tells him on Sunday.

He is not used to visitors on Sunday. Sunday is his own day — no particular schedule, a different rhythm, the garden less task and more presence. He works when he feels like working and stops when he doesn’t. He had been sitting on the bench near the cold frame, simply sitting, which is something he has had to learn how to do again over the last seven years, when he hears the gate.

He does not get up immediately. He waits for the sound of her feet on the gravel, and then he waits a moment longer, and then he says: “I’m at the bench.”

She finds him. She sits down at the far end of it, leaving space, and she has her tablet with her but she doesn’t look at it. She has prepared what she’s going to say.

She tells him about the documentation. The ZVA protocol. The resident transition procedure. The threshold.

He listens.

When she finishes, there is a silence.

“I know,” he says.

She looks at him.

“Not the specific documents,” he says. “But the shape of it. I’ve known the shape of it since 2036.” He looks at the yard. “You build a model that assigns value, you have to reckon with what it does to the things it assigns low value to. I reckoned with it late. When I got here — when I understood what 0.31 means in practice — I had a choice about whether to leave or stay.”

“You stayed,” she says.

“I stayed.”

“Because of the garden?”

He considers this.

“Because leaving felt like the last in a series of turnings-away,” he says. “I had turned away from enough things. I wanted to stop.” He looks at the bench, at the wood grain, at his own hands. “I don’t know if that was wisdom or stubbornness. Probably both.”

The cold frame seedlings are visible through the glass panel — green, tentative, committed now to the direction they’ve chosen.

“They’ll begin the secondary review,” he says. “It runs for ninety days. After that, if the zone scores below threshold — which it will — they’ll issue a remediation order. The residents will receive notification. There will be an appeals period.” He pauses. “The appeals rarely change anything.”

She is quiet.

“What can you do?” she asks.

He looks at the garden.

“Tend it,” he says. “For as long as I can.”

She looks at him for a moment. Not with pity — he is grateful for that. With something more precise. Something like recognition.

“That’s not enough,” she says.

“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”

The sun has moved enough that the cold frame is in full light now. The seedlings stand up straighter in it, visibly.

“It’s what I have,” he says. “What do you have?”

She looks down at her tablet. She looks up.

“I don’t know yet,” she says.