She comes on Sunday without a reason prepared, which has started to feel less like a lapse in professionalism and more like the truest thing she does all week.

He is waiting at the gate before she reaches the bolt-latch, which he doesn’t usually do, and something in that — the waiting, the small breach of his own habitual stillness — makes her walk faster.

“What,” she says.

He doesn’t answer. He just steps back and lets her see past him into the yard, toward the south bed, where the third plant from the end is doing something she wasn’t prepared for: a single open flower, pale as the inside of a shell, with a flush of colour at the edges like something blushing.

She stops walking.

“It opened yesterday morning,” he says. “I’ve been waiting to show someone who’d understand what it cost to get here.”

She crosses to the bed and crouches the way she has learned to crouch around things that matter to him — carefully, without touching, close enough to see the fine structure of the petal, the way it curls back on itself at the very edge. She doesn’t have language for flowers. She has language for data, for gaps, for the specific grammar of a system’s failures. This asks nothing of that vocabulary at all, and she finds she’s grateful for the rest.

“I picked the wrong colour packet, probably,” she says. “I didn’t even look. I just took what was there.”

“You picked exactly the right one.” He crouches beside her. “There’s no wrong colour. There’s only whatever the plant decides to be, once you’ve done the part that’s yours to do.”

She looks at him sideways. “Is that a metaphor.”

“It’s a fact about sweet peas,” he says, “that happens to also be true of other things.”

She almost laughs, and does, briefly, the sound surprising them both a little.

They stay there a long time, longer than either of them tracks, while more buds nearby show the same pale seam readying itself. She counts six that look close. He tells her it will be a dozen by midweek, then more than either of them can count, and then, in a month, none at all — sweet peas don’t linger, he says, they spend everything they have on a short window and then they’re done.

“That’s sad,” she says.

“It’s not,” he says. “It’s just accurate. Sad is a judgment. This is just what the plant is for.”

She thinks about that longer than she says out loud, and when she finally stands to leave, she looks back once at the single open flower, memorising it the way you memorise something you already suspect won’t be there, in exactly this form, again.