He puts the second set of supports in on Thursday, ahead of schedule, because the plants are outrunning his estimate the way they sometimes do in a warm, wet spring.

The work is simple and he’s grateful for that — canes, string, the same grid he’s built every year for seven years, muscle memory doing most of the deciding while his mind goes where it wants. Today it goes to Mara, to the sentence he left unfinished on the bench two days ago, to the fact that she hasn’t asked him to finish it and he doesn’t know if that’s tact or fear or simply respect for the shape of what he’s willing to give.

He thinks: I should tell her before she has to guess.

He thinks, immediately after: not yet.

He knows the second thought is a smaller version of the first thought he ever had about the model, about the committee, about the eleven — the seven — years of silence in this yard. Not yet has been the shape of most of his failures. He recognises it even as he reaches for it again, and reaches for it anyway, because recognising a pattern has never once been the same as being free of it.

He finishes the supports. He deadheads the spent blooms from the first flush, dropping them into a bucket rather than the compost — he’ll dry some of these, the way he always does, though he’s never entirely sure why, since he never uses the dried flowers for anything. Habit outlives its reasons more often than people admit.

Daniel stops by in the early evening, alone this time, no forms, just checking in the way he’s started to, which Elias has noticed and not commented on, because commenting on it might make Daniel self-conscious enough to stop.

“You look tired,” Daniel says.

“I’m seventy-one. Tired is the baseline.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

Elias looks at him for a moment, weighing how much of the truth a near-stranger has earned. Not much, he decides. Not yet.

“I’m fine,” he says, which is not quite a lie, since fine has never had a fixed definition, and he has always found ways to be technically accurate about the state of himself.

Daniel doesn’t push. He picks up a stray length of twine from the ground instead, coils it without being asked, and hands it back — small, wordless, exactly the kind of help that doesn’t require Elias to explain anything at all.

Elias takes it, and does not trust himself to say thank you in a voice that would come out steady.