By Tuesday evening, when she comes after work, the row has become something she doesn’t have a word for.

Not five or eight now — she stopped being able to count from the gate the moment she opened it, the whole south bed gone over to colour in the space of a week, pale shell-pink and something closer to violet further down the row where the light hits differently, a density of flower that makes the green underneath almost incidental. The smell reaches her before she’s halfway across the yard, sweet in a way that has nothing false in it, nothing manufactured — the specific, complicated sweetness of something that exists for exactly this purpose and no other, briefly, on purpose.

Elias is at the bench, not working, which is unusual enough that she notices it before she notices anything else.

“You’re not doing anything,” she says.

“I’m looking at it.” He doesn’t get up. “There’s a version of me that would call this wasted time. I’ve stopped listening to him.”

She sits beside him. The bench is warm from the day’s sun, the last of it going long and gold across the gantry, and for a while neither of them says anything, which has become, between them, its own kind of conversation.

“It won’t last,” he says eventually, not looking at her, looking at the row. “Three weeks, maybe four, if the weather’s kind. Then it’s over, and next year — if there’s a next year for this bed — it starts again from nothing.”

“You say that like it doesn’t bother you.”

“It bothers me every year.” He is quiet for a moment. “This year it bothers me differently.”

She waits, but he doesn’t finish it, and she has learned, across these weeks, not to pull at the thread when he leaves one hanging — that he says exactly as much as he means to say, and the rest is his to carry at his own pace, if he carries it at all.

“I should get supports in for the second flush,” he says instead, standing, the small hitch in his back arriving on schedule as he does. “There’ll be a second flush, if I keep deadheading.”

She watches him go to the shed for stakes, and sits a while longer on the warm bench, turning over the sentence he didn’t finish — this year it bothers me differently — the way you turn over a stone you suspect has something underneath it, deciding, for now, not yet to look.