He wakes on Sunday to a pain sharp enough that it isn’t ambiguous anymore.

Not unbearable — he has known worse, in other parts of his life, physical and otherwise — but specific, located, undeniable in a way the weeks of vague ache have not been. It sits low and to the left, and it stays with him through the kettle, through the walk out to the yard, through the first twenty minutes of work he does more slowly than he’s done anything in years.

He sits on the bench earlier than usual and does not immediately go back to the rows.

He runs the arithmetic he’s been avoiding since April. Six weeks of vague warning. Then movement, upward and around. Now this — a location, a specificity, the kind of pain that stops being a mystery and starts being a message. He is seventy-one. He knows, in the abstract, useless way you know things about your own eventual ending, that bodies at seventy-one send messages like this fairly often, and that some of them are minor, and some of them are not, and that the only way to know which is the one thing he has spent two months refusing to do.

He thinks about Mara’s seed bag, the sentence he gave her without meaning to explain it — somewhere you’d remember, if you needed to find it in a hurry. He hears it now the way she must have heard it: as a door he opened by accident and didn’t have the courage to walk all the way through.

He thinks: I should go to the clinic.

He thinks, immediately: not yet.

He recognises the pattern with a clarity that almost makes him laugh, sitting there in the cool morning with the pain settling into something he’ll have to carry through the rest of the day regardless of what he decides — the same not yet that cost him nine years of silence, now applied to his own body, as if he has learned nothing at all, or as if some patterns are simply load-bearing, structural, impossible to remove without the whole self coming down with them.

He gets up eventually. He does the morning’s essential work, slower than usual, and lets the rest wait.

He does not go to the clinic today either. But he sits with the decision differently than he has before — not as a settled thing, but as a debt, quietly accruing interest, that he knows, somewhere honest in himself, he will have to pay soon.