On Saturday morning he goes to the south bed first.

The sweet peas have reached the canes he set in on Tuesday — thin bamboo uprights, four of them, with string strung between in a simple grid. He watched them approach the string the way you watch something slow and inevitable with the specific attention of someone who has stopped trying to make it go faster. And now the tendrils — the fine coiling shoots that the plant puts out at intervals, feeling for something to hold — have found the string and have begun, tentatively, to take hold.

Not gripping yet. Testing.

He stays crouched for a long time.

He thinks about her. He thinks about the notebook she mentioned — the document — and the particular quality of the writing she described: not a form, not a report, not in the vocabulary of the Accord at all. Just what she had seen. What she had counted. What the numbers missed.

He thinks about what he said on Monday — I want you to have it — and how she received it. Okay. The weight of that word.

He is seventy-one years old.

He has been waiting for something that he could not have named before she arrived: not rescue, not reversal. Something more like witness. The thing that changes when you are not the only one who knows.

The tendrils hold the string.

Not committed yet. Still deciding.

He thinks: this is what the beginning of things looks like. Before the violence of the summer flowering, before the colour — this. The pale, tentative testing of something that has not yet committed to itself.

He is glad she brought them.

He doesn’t know what comes next. He doesn’t know what she is writing or what she intends to do with it or whether it will make any difference to a system that has already predetermined its conclusion. He knows the outcome. He has known the outcome, in its broad shape, for years.

He crouches in the south bed in the mild spring morning and watches the sweet peas test the string.

He thinks: they will not be here in November.

He thinks: they will be here in June, and July, and August.

He thinks: the interim is the point.

He stands up.

He goes to start the morning’s proper work.