She comes straight from Regional Data Standards, still in her work clothes, and finds him waiting at the gate the way he waited once before, on the day the sweet peas first opened, and understands from the shape of his stillness that this time the news runs the other direction.

He shows her the notice without preamble. She reads it standing, the way he read it, and feels the thirty days land in her chest with a specific, physical weight, heavier somehow than the abstraction of the corridor review she’d been dreading for weeks.

“Thirty days,” she says.

“No earlier than thirty days. It could be longer. It won’t be much longer.”

She looks past him at the row — the beets nearly done, the beds beyond it doing their ordinary business, the whole small stubborn architecture of seven years standing in a strip of land the size of nothing, by any measure that matters to the system that’s about to erase it.

“What do we do,” she asks, and hears the we land the way it did the first time he said it to her, months ago, a word that used to be his and now belongs to both of them.

“We use the thirty days,” he says. “Properly. Not frantically. I don’t want to spend the end of this rushing.” He looks at his hands, faint soil still in the creases the way it always is. “I want to finish the harvest. I want to save every seed worth saving. I want Daniel and Priya to have what they need before the beds are gone. And I want—” he stops, and she waits, because she’s learned that his pauses are never empty, only loading. “I want you here for as much of it as you can manage. Not out of obligation. Because I want it.”

“I’ll be here,” she says. “As much as I can manage is going to be most of it.”

He nods, and for a moment neither of them says anything else, because the thirty days are already, in some sense, beginning — every minute now carrying the specific weight of being counted.

“Did she get it,” Mara asks eventually. “The parcel.”

“I don’t know yet,” he says. “I have one way to check, carefully, without exposing either of us. I’ll look tomorrow. Tonight I’d rather just be here.”

She takes his hand, and they stand at the gate a while longer, the evening settling over a garden that has thirty days, or perhaps a little more, left to be exactly what it’s always been.