He is in the third row when he notices it.

He has been weeding since 07:00 — the winter has left opportunists in the rows, things that looked like nothing in February and are now clearly something. He pulls them with the efficiency of long practice, barely thinking, the motion absorbed into his hands and away from his mind.

He is three metres into the third row when he realises he is angry.

Not anxious. Not resigned. Angry.

He sits back on his heels and stays there for a moment, examining it. It has been a long time since he has been angry. He had thought, genuinely, that he had moved past it — past the whole category. He had made his peace, or the functional substitute for peace. He had come to the garden. He had tended things. He had let the years do what years do.

He is angry now.

Not at the Accord — that would be too simple. Not at any individual person. At something more structural and more personal at once: at the decade he spent telling himself that his discomfort was sufficient response to things that required more than discomfort. At the comfort he had mistaken for peace. At the seven years of mornings in this yard that he had told himself was a form of defiance when it was also, he can see now — from the outside, from Mara’s face when she said that’s not enough — a form of hiding.

You can hide in a garden.

He had not known he was hiding.

He pulls a weed. Drops it.

The spring morning sits around him, indifferent and clean. The soil smells like itself. The cold frame has developed, overnight, a fine fog on its glass that means the seedlings are respiring, doing what seedlings do, pushing up toward light with the absolute concentration of things that have no other option.

He is seventy-one years old.

He built the mechanism that is destroying this place.

He has been here for seven years, tending it.

He does not know yet what anger requires. He has not been angry in a long time and he has forgotten what it wants from you — what it’s for. He knows what resignation is for, and grief, and even the long ambivalent peace of living with things you cannot change.

Anger is different.

He thinks: maybe it requires something.

He does not know what, yet.

He pulls the next weed.

The seedlings fog the glass.