Sunday is quiet in a way that feels, after the last two weeks, almost suspicious.

No notices. No visitors. Daniel doesn’t come, which Elias notes without worrying about — a man is allowed a Sunday that isn’t about forms and gardens. He spends the morning on ordinary maintenance: hoeing between the brassicas, checking the compost, refilling the ketil so the water for tomorrow’s seedlings won’t shock them with cold.

The sweet peas are past their first peak now, the earliest flowers browning and dropping, but the second flush has come in thick behind them exactly as he predicted, so that the row reads, from a distance, as continuous — no visible seam between what’s ending and what’s beginning, just an unbroken field of colour that will, if you didn’t know better, look permanent.

He knows better. He has always known better. That has never once made the row less beautiful.

He thinks about Mara’s silence — she hasn’t come since Friday, which isn’t unusual, she has a life at Meridian Street and a flatmate and a rhythm that doesn’t orbit entirely around this yard, whatever it might feel like from the inside of his own solitude. He resists the urge to read anything into three quiet days. He has spent enough of his life reading meaning into silence that turned out to have none.

In the afternoon he sits at the bench longer than the work requires, watching the light change, and lets himself think, deliberately, about the sentence he still hasn’t finished for her. This year it bothers me differently.

He could finish it now, alone, to nobody. He tries.

This year it bothers me differently because I don’t think I’ll see the flush after this one.

He sits with that sentence for a long time after he’s formed it, testing its weight, deciding whether it’s true or whether it’s the kind of thing a tired man tells himself in an empty garden on a slow Sunday, which sound similar and are not the same.

He doesn’t know. That, at least, is honest.

He gets up eventually and does the last of the day’s small tasks — closing the cold frame vents against the evening chill, checking the standpipe, coiling the hose the way he always coils it, precise, unthinking, the last competent gesture of a day that otherwise asked very little of him.

The garden holds its colour into the dusk a little longer than the rest of the yard, the pale flowers catching what light is left after everything else has gone grey.