By Monday there are five open, and the bees have found them.

He watches one work the row methodically, the specific unhurried thoroughness of something that has no concept of a deadline, and thinks, not for the first time, that this is the closest thing he has to a model of how work should feel — necessary, absorbing, entirely without anxiety about its own outcome.

Daniel comes by in the afternoon, not for forms this time, just to walk the row and see what’s opened. He brings his wife, who Elias hasn’t met before — a quiet woman named Priya who looks at the flowers the way some people look at something they’d forgotten they were allowed to want.

“The Whitlocks got a case number,” Daniel says. “Their appeal’s officially logged. Doesn’t mean anything yet, but it’s something to point at.”

“It’s more than most people manage,” Elias says. “A case number is a foothold.”

Priya crouches at the row without being invited to, the way people do in this garden once they’ve decided it’s safe to. “Is this the whole point,” she asks, not quite looking at him, “or is there more to it than flowers?”

He considers the question longer than it probably needs. “The flowers are the point,” he says finally. “The rest is what I tell myself about the flowers, on the days I need a reason bigger than the flowers themselves.”

She nods slowly, as if that answer costs her something to accept, and he understands, watching her, that she is the kind of person who has needed reasons bigger than the immediate thing for a long time, out of necessity, and finds it strange to be given permission not to.

They stay an hour. He gives them seed he doesn’t need — more calendula, a handful of the courgette he always overproduces — and Priya thanks him in a way that makes him look away from her for a second, because he has forgotten, across seven years of relative solitude, how much a small kindness can cost the person receiving it, and how much it can also, briefly, repair.

After they’ve gone he stands at the row for a while, counting flowers out of habit rather than necessity — five, and by tomorrow, he guesses, seven or eight.

He thinks: this is the part of the year I would keep, if I could keep only one part.

He does not let himself finish the thought that follows that one. Not today. The bees are still working. There is still afternoon left, and afternoons, this year, have started to feel like something to spend carefully.