She knows something has changed the moment she comes through the gate on Friday, before he’s said a word — the particular stillness of him at the bench, hands empty, not pretending to be occupied with anything.

“You went,” she says. Not a question.

“Tuesday. I got the results yesterday.”

She sits down across from him rather than beside him, because she wants to see his face while he says whatever comes next, and he seems to understand this, and doesn’t ask her to move.

“It’s a mass,” he says. “In a location that explains the last four months. Operable, in principle. The percentages are — not good. Better than nothing. Worse than they would have been if I’d walked in when it first started.”

She feels something in her chest go very still, the specific stillness of information arriving too large to process at its actual size, so that the mind processes it instead in small manageable pieces.

“Worse because you waited,” she says.

“Yes.” He doesn’t soften it. “That’s mine to carry, not yours. I’m telling you because you asked me not to pretend with you, and I meant what I said when I agreed to that. I’m not telling you so you’ll absolve me of the four months.”

“I wasn’t going to absolve you,” she says, and hears how sharp it comes out, and doesn’t take it back, because it’s true, and because gentleness right now would be its own kind of lie. “I’m angry. I’m allowed to be angry and still be here.”

“You are,” he agrees. “Both of those, at once. I’d expect nothing less honest from you.”

She reaches for his hand, finally, the first time she’s initiated the touch rather than received it, and he lets her, his hand rough and steady in a way his voice, underneath its careful calm, isn’t quite managing to be.

“What happens now,” she asks. “Practically.”

“A treatment plan. Decisions I haven’t made yet about how aggressively to pursue it, and what that costs, and what it doesn’t guarantee regardless.” He looks at the empty row where the flowers used to be. “I don’t know yet. I know I don’t want to make those decisions today.”

“Okay,” she says. “Today we don’t decide anything. Today I’m just here.”

He nods, and for a while that’s all either of them does — sit together at the bench, her hand in his, the garden going about its ordinary business around them, entirely unaware of what it’s just been asked to hold.