Thursday, and the ache moves.

Not far — from the lower torso up and slightly around, a new location for an old sensation, the way weather moves through a body that’s already decided to be unwell before it announces the specifics. He notices it while lifting the watering can, a motion he’s done ten thousand times without consequence, and this time it costs him something visible enough that he sets the can down and stands still until it passes.

It takes longer to pass than these moments used to.

He does not tell Mara about the movement. He told her more than he meant to on Tuesday — the marriage, the someone-he-lost, the door he opened and then closed before he was ready to walk all the way through it — and some instinct, older than reason, tells him not to add a physical fact to an emotional one in the same week. She is carrying enough. He is aware, with the specific clarity of a man who has spent his life managing systems, that timing matters as much as content, that the same true thing said too early or too late does damage a well-timed version wouldn’t.

He finishes the watering carefully, moving less than he needs to, conserving something he can’t quite name.

In the afternoon he goes through the seed tin again, an activity that has become, this week, less about organisation and more about something closer to ritual. He counts the envelopes. Twenty-three varieties, some duplicated across years, going back to the very first bed in 2040. He finds the earliest one — rough paper, faded ink, beetroot, first bed — and holds it for a while, remembering the man he was that first October, counting paces in the cold to measure a plot of land nobody else wanted.

He was forty-something then. Angrier. Surer of very little except that he had to do something with his hands or lose whatever was left of himself.

He is not that man now. He isn’t sure what he is now, exactly — something quieter, something that has traded certainty for attention, which he has come, slowly, to believe is the better trade, whatever it costs.

He puts the tin away and goes back out to the row, where the third and final flush of the sweet peas is opening, thinner than the first two, the plant’s last honest effort before it turns entirely toward seed.

He watches it a long time before he lets himself go in for the evening.