He makes the decision about Lena on Wednesday, alone, sitting on the bench with the treatment schedule folded in his coat pocket, and it arrives not as a dramatic resolution but as something closer to exhaustion finally winning an argument he’s been losing to himself for nine years.

He will not call her. He has no way to call her that wouldn’t announce itself to the systems still watching, faintly, for exactly this kind of reappearance, and he has believed for nine years — believes still, mostly — that his silence is the one form of protection he can still offer her, whatever else he’s failed to offer.

But he will not say nothing either. Not anymore. Not with a folded schedule in his pocket that has an ending built into its very shape, whichever direction the percentages go.

He decides on the smallest possible gesture, the one that asks nothing of her in return: a seed, from Owen’s unidentified jar, the one he’s grown every year for seven years without ever learning what it is. He will send it to her — not with his name attached, not with an explanation, just the seed itself, and a single line, unsigned, that could mean everything or nothing to a woman who believes her father has been dead for six years.

Someone who knew him thought you should have this.

It isn’t enough. He knows it isn’t enough even as he decides on it. It is, he thinks, exactly the right amount of enough for a man who has spent his whole adult life mistaking silence for safety and safety for love — the largest gesture he can make without endangering her, and the smallest gesture he can make and still call himself, honestly, present in her life at all.

He writes the line on a plain card, in handwriting he hopes she won’t recognise, though some part of him — the part still hoping, after everything, to be found — half wants her to.

He doesn’t send it today. He needs to work out the how: a route that doesn’t trace to Sector 9, a version of himself the system can’t reconstruct from a single small parcel.

He puts the card and the seed in the shed, in the tin, next to everything else he’s saving for a future he isn’t certain he’ll get to see.

He sits a while longer on the bench before going in, feeling, for the first time in longer than he can name, something that isn’t quite peace but sits close enough beside it to be mistaken for it in poor light.