He sends the parcel on Friday, finally, having spent two weeks working out a route he’s satisfied won’t lead back to this address.

Daniel helps, in the end, without being told the full reason — Elias asks only whether he’d be willing to post something from a counter in Sector 4, on his way to somewhere else, and Daniel agrees without asking why, which Elias has come to understand is simply the shape of the friendship they’ve built: help offered without needing the whole story to justify it.

The parcel is small. The seed, wrapped in a twist of paper the way he’s wrapped every seed he’s ever saved. The unsigned card. Nothing else — no return address, no name, nothing that would survive even a cursory trace back to a rail yard nobody official believes is occupied.

He watches Daniel walk toward the tram with it, and feels something he doesn’t have a clean word for — not relief exactly, and not the peace he half-expected either, but something adjacent to both: the specific, hollow lightness of having finally done the smallest right thing available to him, nine years too late, in a form too small to undo any of what the lateness cost.

He goes back to the garden and works the beds through the rest of the morning, his first consultation now three days behind him, a treatment schedule now genuinely underway rather than merely discussed — appointments, a calendar he’s started keeping in the same notebook where he logs the compost and the brassica counts, small practical facts sitting next to each other without hierarchy, because that’s what a notebook is for, holding what needs holding without judging its size.

He thinks about Lena receiving the parcel, whenever it reaches her — days from now, he estimates, given the route. He doesn’t let himself imagine her reaction in detail. He has learned, the hard way, that imagining outcomes he can’t control is its own kind of theft, taking something from a future that hasn’t happened yet and spending it now, badly, on anxiety that changes nothing.

He waters the row instead. The beets are nearly ready. The brassicas need thinning again. The ordinary work continues, indifferent to what he’s just sent into the world, and he is, on balance, grateful for its indifference — grateful for a task that asks only his hands and not his whole aching, uncertain heart.