She goes on Saturday, telling herself it’s to see the sweet peas.

The bolt-latch, the gravel, the familiar geometry of the yard opening up in front of her — she has stopped noticing she does this, the small internal recalibration that happens every time she comes through the gate, the sense of a held breath finally let go. Elias is at the beet bed, but he straightens when he hears her, which he doesn’t always do.

“You’re not usually a Saturday,” he says.

“I had something to tell you. It could have waited.” She doesn’t sit. “My supervisor called me in. He’s seen my access logs — the database, the public documentation. He knows I’ve been looking at Sector 9 outside my scope.”

Elias sets down his trowel with the specific care of someone who wants his hands to have somewhere to be while he thinks. “Did he say anything about the document?”

“No. I don’t think he knows about that. This was about curiosity as a — his word — a variable. Something that gets modelled.” She looks at the sweet peas, heavy now along the top strings, because it’s easier than looking at him. “He told me to stop. He wasn’t unkind about it. That’s almost the worst part.”

“What did you say?”

“I said we were understood.” A small, unamused sound, not quite a laugh. “Which is true. Just not in the way he thinks.”

Elias is quiet for a while. The garden does what it does around them — a bee working the fennel flowers, the low constant hush of leaves.

“You should be more careful than you have been,” he says finally.

“I know.”

“I don’t say that to frighten you. I say it because I have some experience in believing carefulness is a kind of cowardice, when actually it’s just tactics. You can be careful and still send the document. You already did the hard part.”

She considers this. “Is that what you did? Careful?”

“No,” he says. “I was neither careful nor brave. I filed a report and then I left and called it enough.” He looks at her directly, which he doesn’t do often. “Don’t let my example be the ceiling of what’s possible. Aim higher than what I managed.”

She doesn’t have an answer for that, so she doesn’t try to make one.

They stand together at the edge of the south bed for a while, not speaking, watching a tendril test the air an inch from the nearest string, undecided, patient, in no hurry at all to commit to anything.

“I should go before Celia wonders,” she says eventually.

He nods. “Come back when you have news. Or when you don’t. Either is fine.”

She leaves through the gate, and for once does not immediately start thinking about her queue.