Saturday, and the row has turned a corner it won’t turn back from.

More pods than flowers now, the third flush already thinning into the same slow brown retreat the first two went through before it. He works the row with the shears, deadheading what’s left, saving what’s ready, and finds himself moving through the task with a deliberateness that has nothing to do with his back or his hands and everything to do with not wanting it to end faster than it has to.

He has done this seven times before. It has never felt like this.

Mara comes in the afternoon, and instead of going to the bench they walk the row together, slowly, while he tells her what he’s never bothered explaining before — which pods are ready, which need another week, how to tell dry-enough-to-save from dry-enough-to-scatter-uselessly-in-the-wind. She listens with the same close attention she brings to everything, and he understands, watching her hands learn the motion of splitting a pod without crushing the seed inside, that he is teaching her something he intends her to keep doing without him.

He doesn’t say that part out loud.

“Next year,” she says, at one point, “will you plant the same colour, or something different?”

“I don’t choose the colour. I choose the packet. The colour chooses itself.” He hands her another dry pod. “But if you’re asking whether I’ll do this again — yes. As long as there’s a bed to do it in.”

She looks at him for a moment, and he can see her deciding not to ask the question underneath that sentence, the one about whether there’ll be a bed, whether there’ll be a him, both of which have started, this month, to feel less like separate uncertainties and more like the same one wearing two faces.

They finish the row as the light goes long. She has a small paper bag of saved seed by the end of it, her own now, separate from his tin, and she holds it like it weighs more than seeds actually weigh.

“Keep it somewhere dry,” he says. “Somewhere you’d remember, if you needed to find it again in a hurry.”

“Why would I need to find it in a hurry?”

He doesn’t answer that directly. “Just somewhere you’d remember,” he says again, and goes back to the shears before she can ask a second time.