He starts saving seed from the earliest flowers on Monday, the ones that finished first and have gone to pod while the later flush still holds its colour behind them.

It’s careful work — waiting for the pods to dry on the vine without letting them shatter and scatter themselves into the soil, judging the exact week when brown has gone far enough. He’s done this every year for seven years and it has never once felt routine; there’s a specific attention seed-saving asks for that other garden tasks don’t, a sense that you are making a promise to a year you won’t be present for in the same way.

This year the thought arrives with an edge he doesn’t examine too closely.

He fills three small envelopes, labels them in his small cramped hand — sweet pea, shell pink, 2047 — and sets them in the tin in the shed where he keeps everything he intends to plant again. The tin is nearly full. Seven years of these envelopes, some faded past reading, a small paper archive of every spring that’s passed through this row.

He thinks about who empties a tin like this, eventually, if he isn’t the one to do it.

He doesn’t finish the thought. He rarely does anymore, with this particular category of thought — he lets them arrive, acknowledges them the way you’d acknowledge a stranger passing on the street, and lets them go without inviting them to stay.

Mara comes in the late afternoon, tired in a way she’s carrying differently than she carried the tiredness of two weeks ago — this is bone-deep, the accumulated cost of the notice on her file, the careful pace she’s forced herself to keep at work, the effort of being unremarkable on purpose.

“You’re saving seed already,” she says, watching him seal the last envelope.

“Some varieties you save early, before the whole row’s finished. You take what’s ready and let the rest keep going.”

She sits on the upturned crate near the shed door, watching him work. “Will you show me how, sometime? Properly, not just watching.”

“Yes,” he says, and means it more than the simple word suggests — there’s something in the asking that feels, to him, like a door opening he hadn’t expected to still be capable of opening. “There’s not much to it. Patience, mostly. Knowing when to trust the plant to have finished its own work.”

“That’s most things with you,” she says. “Knowing when to trust something to have finished its own work.”

He looks at her for a moment, surprised by how precisely she’s named something he’s never said aloud to anyone. “Yes,” he says again. “I suppose it is.”

He hands her the tin to close, and she does, carefully, the way she does most things now that matter to him.