Thursday, and he can’t get comfortable kneeling anymore.

It arrives without drama — he’s thinning the second sowing of beets, a task he’s done hundreds of times without thinking about his own body at all, and finds himself shifting his weight every few minutes, unable to find the angle that used to be automatic. He finishes the row anyway, slower than usual, and sits back on his heels at the end of it for longer than the task requires.

He does the arithmetic he’s been avoiding.

Six weeks now, roughly, since the first hint he let himself notice — the hand on the paal, the sitting without coffee. The ache has not gotten sharper. It has gotten more present, which is a different kind of worse: less like pain and more like an occupation, something that has moved in and started rearranging the furniture of his days without asking.

He thinks about the clinic again, the way he thinks about it now most days, briefly, like touching a stove to confirm it’s still hot.

He doesn’t go.

He tells himself the reasons in order, the way he always does: that walking in re-enters him into a system he’s spent seven years successfully avoiding; that whatever this is has been slow enough, so far, to suggest it isn’t urgent; that he is seventy-one, and seventy-one bodies do this, ache and complain and occupy themselves without it meaning what younger bodies mean by the same symptoms.

He knows, somewhere under the reasons, that he isn’t only protecting himself from the system. He’s protecting himself from a diagnosis he isn’t ready to carry into a spring this good. The column is out. The sweet peas are still holding their colour. Daniel’s case number is moving through a queue somewhere. He does not want to know something that would make him spend what’s left of this differently.

He stands, eventually, the row finished, and the effort costs him something visible enough that he checks, reflexively, whether anyone’s at the fence to see it.

Nobody is.

He goes to the bench and sits with water rather than coffee, watching the second flush of flowers hold their ground against the first flush’s slow retreat, and decides, again, not to decide anything today.

Tomorrow, he tells himself. Or the day after.

He has told himself this before. He knows exactly what it’s worth.