Daniel arrives on Sunday with news that could go either way, and Elias reads his face before he reads the paper he’s holding.

“Preliminary response,” Daniel says, handing it over. “On the appeal.”

The language is exactly what Elias expects, because he half-wrote language like it himself, a lifetime ago: the review board acknowledges the submission and notes the community contribution documented therein. The appeal remains under consideration. A determination is expected within the standard sixty-day window.

“That’s not a no,” Elias says.

“It’s not a yes either.”

“It’s rarely either, at this stage. This means someone read it — actually read it, not just logged it. The acknowledgment language is specific. They wouldn’t cite your contribution documentation unless a person looked at it.” He hands the paper back. “It’s slow. It’s designed to be slow. But this is movement.”

Daniel exhales something that isn’t quite relief but is adjacent to it. “Priya wanted me to ask — if it goes badly, is there another step?”

“There’s a secondary appeal, if the first is denied. Harder to win. Not impossible.” Elias doesn’t dress it up. “I’ll help with that too, if it comes to it.”

“You keep saying that like it costs you nothing.”

“It doesn’t cost me nothing,” Elias says. “It costs me an afternoon, and the specific discomfort of walking into a building I spent years avoiding. That’s not nothing, but it’s also not much, set against what it might cost you.” He looks at the paper in Daniel’s hand. “I have very little left that I can spend usefully. This is one of the few things.”

Daniel doesn’t ask what he means by very little left, and Elias doesn’t explain it, and the sentence sits between them for a moment before Daniel, tactfully, changes the subject to the flowers instead — asks what happens to the row once the bloom’s finished, whether it comes back, whether any of it stays.

“The plants don’t,” Elias says. “Sweet peas are annuals. They give everything to this and then they’re finished, and you pull them out in autumn and start again from seed the following spring, if there’s a following spring for this bed to have.”

“That’s it? No mercy for something that worked that hard?”

“No mercy,” Elias agrees. “Just seed, saved carefully, planted again. It’s not mercy. It’s just what continuing looks like, when the thing that did the flowering can’t do it twice.”

Daniel looks at him for a moment longer than the sentence requires, and doesn’t ask what else Elias might be talking about.