Friday, and a man he doesn’t know is waiting at the fence gap.

Not Mrs. Aldous, not anyone from the water point. Younger, maybe fifty, wearing the kind of jacket that used to mean something in an office and now just means it hasn’t worn out yet. He is standing the way people stand when they’ve decided to wait rather than knock.

“You’re the one with the garden,” the man says, when Elias comes close enough.

“I’m the one who’s here.”

“Owen used to talk about you. Before.” The man doesn’t finish the sentence, and doesn’t need to. “I’m Daniel. Block 4, near the old signal house. I got the notice.”

Elias waits.

“I don’t know what to do with it,” Daniel says. “It says ninety days, it says appeal window, it says a lot of words. I read it four times and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to actually do, if there’s anything to do.”

“There’s a process,” Elias says. “It’s slow, and it’s designed to be slow, and most of the time it doesn’t change the outcome. But it exists, and using it is not nothing.”

“You know this because—”

“Because I used to write the processes.” He says it flatly, the way he’s said it only once before, to a woman standing exactly where this man is standing now. “I know the shape of the form. I know what it’s looking for and what it isn’t.”

Daniel studies him for a moment, recalculating something. “Would you help me fill it out?”

“Yes.”

“Just like that?”

“It’s the thing I know how to be useful for,” Elias says. “I don’t have much else.”

Daniel doesn’t smile, exactly, but something in his shoulders loosens a fraction. “There’s two of us. Me and the Whitlocks, down the row. Same corridor, same notice.”

“Bring them Sunday. I’ll have the forms ready to look at.” He pauses. “It won’t promise you anything. I want to be clear about that before you thank me for it.”

“I wasn’t going to thank you,” Daniel says, and this time there is something almost like a smile. “I was going to ask if you had any spare seed. My wife wants to try something in the yard, if we’re still going to be in it come summer.”

Elias looks at him for a long moment, and then goes to the shed, and comes back with a paper twist of calendula and the last of the courgette he’d set aside for himself.

“They’ll come up in most soil,” he says. “Even bad soil. Especially bad soil, sometimes.”

Daniel takes them like they’re worth more than they are, which, this week, they might be.