He is sorting seeds when she arrives.

Saturday. A table pulled out into the late morning light, a collection of envelopes, paper packets, a few salvaged small jars — the accumulated seeds of seven years, some labelled, some not, some still viable and some probably not but worth trying. It is an annual task, this: the sorting, the discarding, the small decisions about what to keep and what to let go.

She comes through the gate with a different quality of step today. He hears it before he sees her. Something tighter, internal, the way people move when they are carrying something and have not yet decided whether to set it down.

He moves a chair next to the table.

She sits. She looks at the seeds.

“What are those?” she asks.

“Courgette. I save too many every year.” He sets that packet aside. “These are French beans — the purple variety, which doesn’t stay purple when you cook it, but the pods are beautiful while they last.” He holds up a jar. “And these I genuinely don’t know. I found them in a tin that Owen left in the shed when he died. I’ve been growing them every year hoping to eventually recognise what they are.”

She looks at the jar. “You’ve been growing things you can’t identify.”

“Every year. Last year: a large bushy plant with no apparent purpose. The year before, a root vegetable of some kind — slightly bitter, reasonably pleasant. The year before that, nothing germinated.”

Despite herself, she almost smiles. “That’s optimistic.”

“It’s something,” he says.

She is quiet for a moment. He returns to the sorting. The table between them has the quality of a neutral space — not comfortable, not uncomfortable. A shared table.

“I found something in the archive,” she says.

He continues sorting. “Tell me.”

She tells him about the Northern Expansion. The Phase 2 corridor. The authorising officer with the redacted name. The date discrepancy.

He listens without pausing.

“Yes,” he says, when she finishes.

She looks at him.

“I suspected it wasn’t the ZVA score driving this,” he says. “The timing was wrong — the score hasn’t changed materially in years. Something external changed.” He sets down a packet. “The Northern Expansion was approved in 2044. If Phase 2 starts in 2048, they need the corridor cleared by 2047. We’re on schedule.”

“You suspected,” she says.

“I suspected.”

She is holding the jar of unidentified seeds, turning it slowly.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asks.

He looks at her.

“You had found your way to it,” he says. “You were going to find it.”

She sets the jar down.

“What do we do?” she asks.

He sorts a packet of brassica seeds into one pile and a packet of calendula into another.

“I don’t know,” he says. “But I’ve been waiting to be asked that question for seven years, and I find I’m glad someone finally has.”