Saturday, and he wakes thinking about what he didn’t tell her.

Not the routing override — he told her everything he actually knows about that, which is less than either of them wanted. What he didn’t tell her is smaller and closer to himself: that her question, standing at the fence with her voice climbing, was the first time in seven years someone has looked at him and asked, directly, whether the systems he built might still be reaching into her life. Not into Sector 9’s abstractly. Into hers, specifically, by name.

He has spent seven years believing the damage he did was contained to a shape he understood — zones, scores, the slow one-directional arithmetic of the model. It had not occurred to him, not really, not until yesterday, that the same architecture might also be capable of something as intimate as choosing which desk a particular flag lands on, which life gets pulled toward which garden.

He goes out to the row before the coffee’s ready.

The first flush is nearly spent now — the earliest flowers browning at the edges, the ones he’s been deadheading into the bucket — but the second flush is coming in behind it, buds thick along the new growth the supports are holding up. It will overlap for a week or so, old flowers going and new ones arriving in the same frame, which he has always found the most honest part of the whole performance: nothing in this bed insists on being only one thing at a time.

He crouches at the base of the row and does the small ritual he does most mornings now, checking without quite admitting he’s checking — the ache still there, unchanged, neither better nor markedly worse, a fact rather than a crisis. He has decided, somewhere in the last two weeks, without formally deciding, that he will keep not-deciding about the clinic for a while longer. He is aware this is a choice with a shape. He makes it anyway.

He thinks about Mara’s unresolved question — was any of it mine — and understands, crouching there, that he is asking a version of the same thing about himself, has been asking it in one form or another for nine years: how much of what he did was chosen, and how much was simply the shape a person takes when a system builds the room around them.

He doesn’t have an answer for her. He doesn’t have one for himself either.

He stands, the hitch arriving on schedule, and goes to make the coffee properly this time.