Saturday, and he starts the treatment plan in the smallest way available — a first consultation, scheduled for the following week, a decision that costs him nothing yet except the act of deciding to keep deciding.

He tells himself this is progress. Some mornings it feels like it.

He works the garden with a deliberateness that has changed register since Thursday — not less careful, but differently careful, the attention of someone counting something without wanting to admit that’s what he’s doing. He thins the summer brassicas. He checks the compost. He does the ordinary maintenance of a place that has no idea, and will never have any idea, that the man tending it is now doing arithmetic he can’t stop doing, converting weeks into percentages and back again.

Daniel comes by in the afternoon, having heard — Mara must have told him something, or he read it in how Elias moves, which has stopped being subtle no matter how much Elias tries.

“You could have told me sooner,” Daniel says, not quite an accusation.

“I could have told myself sooner too,” Elias says. “I’m working on the lag.”

Daniel doesn’t offer sympathy that would embarrass either of them. He picks up a trowel instead, without asking, and starts on the row Elias hasn’t gotten to yet, working alongside him in a silence that says more than most conversations manage.

“I don’t know how to help with this part,” Daniel says eventually, not looking up from the soil.

“You’re helping,” Elias says. “This is helping. You don’t need a special version of it.”

They work through the afternoon together, two men and a row of beets that don’t care what either of them is carrying, and Elias finds, unexpectedly, that the ordinary labour of it — soil, root, the small violence of thinning — is closer to comfort than anything anyone has said to him all week.

Near evening, Daniel asks the question Elias has been waiting for, in one form or another, since Thursday.

“Is there anyone you need to tell? Besides Mara?”

Elias is quiet for a long moment, the trowel still in his hand.

“There’s someone,” he says finally. “I haven’t decided yet what telling her would cost her, against what not telling her already has.”

Daniel doesn’t ask who. He nods, the way he’s learned to nod at the edges of things Elias isn’t ready to walk through, and goes back to the row, and lets the question sit, unanswered, exactly where Elias needs it to sit for now.