She tells him on Wednesday, arriving straight from work without changing, which he notices because she usually stops home first.

“It’s published,” she says, before the gate has even swung shut behind her. “The column. It’s out.”

He sets down the hoe.

She recites it to him from memory — she’s clearly read it more times than she’s admitting — the compounding mechanism described in language stripped of names, of sectors, of anything that would lead back to either of them, but unmistakably, structurally, the thing he built and the thing he told her about on a bench with a cold cup of coffee two months ago.

He listens without interrupting, the way he listened to her the first time she told him about the ZVA, and when she finishes he is quiet long enough that she asks if he’s alright.

“I’m trying to work out what I feel,” he says. “I expected relief. I don’t think that’s what this is.”

“What is it?”

He considers it honestly before answering. “Grief, I think. Which doesn’t make sense — this is the thing I wanted. Someone finally saying it out loud, in a place people who matter might read it.” He picks the hoe back up, sets it down again, needing his hands to have somewhere to be. “But I spent nine years being the only person who knew, and there was a kind of terrible privacy in that. Now it’s not private anymore. It belongs to strangers arguing in comment sections. That’s what I wanted. It still feels like losing something.”

She doesn’t try to talk him out of the feeling, which he’s grateful for — she has learned, faster than he expected anyone to learn it, that some things don’t need correcting, only witnessing.

“Does it change anything,” he asks, “practically? For Sector 9?”

“Not yet. Maybe not at all, not directly. It’s an argument now, not a policy.” She looks toward the row, still holding its improbable colour into the evening. “But arguments are how policy eventually happens. It’s the wrong tense — future conditional, not present — but it’s not nothing.”

“No,” he agrees. “It’s not nothing.”

They stand together at the edge of the south bed as the light goes long and gold, the way it has been going lately, and for once neither of them tries to say anything more useful than the silence already is.