The notice arrives at the garden itself on the last day of June, which is how he knows, before he’s even read it, that this one is different from every notice that’s come before.

It isn’t posted to a communal board. It’s affixed directly to the fence gap, in a clear sleeve designed to survive weather, addressed not to a person but to a location: Occupant(s), Unregistered Land Use, Parcel 9-R-114. The Accord has never, in seven years, addressed this place directly. It has always addressed the district, the sector, the abstraction. This is the first time the system has looked at his garden and decided it deserved its own letter.

Following completion of the Sector 9 Zone Viability Assessment and corridor review, this parcel has been designated for remediation under the Northern Expansion Priority Corridor framework. Clearance is scheduled to commence no earlier than 30 days from this notice. Occupants without registered tenancy should vacate any structures or materials of value prior to this date. No relocation assistance is available for unregistered land use.

Thirty days.

He reads it twice, standing at the fence with his hand not quite steady on the sleeve, and finds that the feeling arriving is not shock — he has expected this letter, in one form or another, for seven years — but something closer to a held breath finally, unavoidably, released.

Thirty days takes him to the end of July. His next treatment cycle runs through most of it. He does the arithmetic without wanting to: the garden and his own body, keeping pace with each other now, two clocks he can’t stop, both counting down toward dates he doesn’t control.

He takes the notice down and folds it, carefully, and puts it in his coat pocket rather than the shed, because some things need to stay close enough to feel their weight rather than filed away where weight becomes abstraction.

He goes back to the row. The beets are ready for their final harvest. The brassicas are past their best but still usable. He works through the afternoon with a focus that has nothing performative in it — not defiance, not despair, just a man doing what there is to do with the time that’s left to do it, because the alternative, stopping, has never once been available to him as a real option.

He will tell Mara tonight. He has learned, finally, the cost of not yet.

He will not make that mistake again, not with this, not with the little time that’s left for either of them to spend it honestly.