She notices, on Monday evening, that he’s moving differently, and this time she says something.

“You’re favouring your left side.”

“I slept badly.”

“You’ve been sleeping badly for weeks. This is different.” She doesn’t let him deflect past it the way he usually manages to. “Elias. What’s actually happening.”

He stops at the row, the shears loose in his hand, and she watches him decide — she has learned to see the decision happening now, the particular stillness that means he’s weighing how much truth a moment can hold.

“There’s a pain,” he says. “It’s been there since April, vague at first. It’s not vague anymore.”

“Have you seen anyone?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because seeing anyone means entering a system I’ve spent seven years successfully avoiding, and because I’m not ready to know what it would tell me.” He says it plainly, without asking for sympathy, which somehow makes it land harder than if he had. “I know how that sounds. I’ve heard myself think it and it sounds like cowardice even to me.”

“It doesn’t sound like cowardice,” she says. “It sounds like fear. Those aren’t the same thing.”

He looks at her for a long moment. “You’re kinder to me than I’ve been to myself.”

“Someone should be.” She sits on the upturned crate near him, not touching him, giving him the space he seems to need to say the rest, if there’s a rest to say. “I’m not going to make you go. I don’t think I could, and I don’t think it would help if I tried. But I want you to know that I know now. You don’t get to carry this alone anymore either.”

Something in his face moves — not quite relief, something adjacent to it, the specific loosening of a man who has been braced to defend a position nobody, in this moment, is attacking.

“Alright,” he says.

“Alright meaning what?”

“Alright meaning I hear you. I’m not promising the clinic. I’m promising I won’t pretend, with you, that this is nothing.” He looks at the row, gone almost entirely to seed now, the colour nearly finished for the year. “That’s what I have today. I hope it’s enough.”

“It’s enough for today,” she says, and means it, though something in her already knows that today won’t be enough for very much longer.