She comes without logging it.

He knows this because he asked her, once — not directly, not a confrontation — he asked her how she documented these visits and she was quiet for a moment before she said: I stopped logging them after the first week. I couldn’t find a category that wasn’t a lie.

He thinks about this while he turns the compost in the right-side bin, which has been going since February and is nearly ready. He thinks about categories. About the forms you fill in and the categories you choose and the accumulated practice of fitting things into boxes that were built before the things existed and so will always be slightly wrong, always leaving something over the edge.

She is at the bench. She has her notebook.

He works, and she writes, and neither of them speaks for a long time. It is the particular silence of people who have become comfortable in the same space — not because they have run out of things to say, but because they have found a register in which presence is enough.

The sweet peas are at twelve centimetres now. The first two leaves — the true leaves, not the cotyledons — are visible on the strongest plants. Deep green, ridged, unmistakable. They no longer look like something uncertain about itself.

She closes the notebook.

“I’m going to send it to someone,” she says.

He sets down the fork. Looks at her.

“Who?” he asks.

She names a researcher at the university’s urban policy institute, who has been writing about algorithmic governance for the last decade and who has a specific interest in remediation zones. He does not know the name but he recognises the description: someone who writes, and publishes, and is therefore someone the Accord is unable to simply mark noted and file.

“What will they do with it?” he asks.

“I don’t know,” she says. “It might be nothing. The university has no authority over the Accord.”

“No,” he says.

“But it’s specific,” she says. “What I’ve written. It has the ZVA records, the date discrepancy, the compounding mechanism. And it has—” she looks at the notebook, “—this. What this place is. What it contains. What the record doesn’t show.”

He is quiet.

“It might not make a difference,” she says.

“It might not,” he agrees.

She looks at him.

“Should I send it?” she asks.

He looks at the yard. The beds, the gantry, the rose on its upper strut moving toward something it has decided on. The south bed. The plants reaching for the string.

He looks back at her.

“Yes,” he says.

She stands. Puts the notebook in her bag.

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” she says.

He picks up the fork.

“Good,” he says.

She says goodbye. He hears her footsteps on the gravel, the sound of the gate.

He turns the compost.

The afternoon light falls across the yard at the particular angle it takes in April — long and clean, the shadows sharp, everything casting itself away from the sun in the direction that is simply away, simply its own nature, not strategic.

He works.

The city moves around the perimeter wall.

He thinks: she is going to send it.

He thinks: it might matter and it might not.

He works.