Saturday, and the first one opens.

He almost misses it — he is at the far row, checking the brassicas, and it’s only on his way back to the standpipe that he sees it out of the corner of his eye: a single flower on the third plant from the end, open since some point this morning, a colour he did not expect and could not have predicted. Not white, not quite pink. Something closer to the inside of a shell, pale with a flush at the edges that deepens as it catches the light.

He stops.

He has grown this variety for seven years and it still does this to him — the specific, stupid gladness of a thing he cannot take credit for. He didn’t choose this colour. Mara didn’t choose it either, not really; she chose a packet, and the packet chose a range, and the plant chose, within that range, exactly this. Nobody decided this flower. It simply arrived, the way most good things arrive, as the result of a thousand small unplanned agreements between soil and weather and seed.

He crouches at the row and looks at it for longer than the morning has time for.

Behind it, half a dozen more buds show the same pale seam at their tips, close enough now that he can guess: tomorrow, or the day after, there will be four. Then a dozen. Then, within a week or two if the weather holds, the whole row will be doing this, all at once, the specific violent abundance that sweet peas save for a short window and then abandon completely.

He thinks about the flaconnetje in the shed, the one he has never opened, has never quite let himself look at directly, and does not go to find it now either.

He thinks, instead, simply: she should see this.

He does not have a way to reach her that doesn’t involve waiting for her to come, so he waits, and works the row anyway, and when he straightens the hitch in his back arrives on schedule, familiar now, almost polite in its punctuality.

He looks at the flower again before he goes in for water.

It is, he thinks, an absurd thing to be glad about, given everything else this spring is carrying. He lets himself be glad about it anyway. He has learned, the hard way, that waiting for a better occasion to feel something good is its own kind of refusal, and he has spent enough of his life refusing.