He checks on Wednesday, through the one careful channel he still trusts — a public delivery confirmation, nothing more, no content, no location, just a single administrative fact he can view without announcing that he’s the one viewing it.

Delivered. June 24. Signature not required.

It reached her nine days ago.

He sits with that for a long time before he lets himself feel anything about it. Delivered is not the same as opened. Opened is not the same as understood. Understood is not the same as believed, and even if she believes it, believed is not the same as forgiven, and he has never once, in nine years of imagining this moment, gotten as far as forgiveness in his own private rehearsals of it.

There has been no reply. He didn’t leave a way for one to reach him, which he understands, sitting here, was its own kind of decision — a door opened exactly wide enough to let something out, and deliberately too narrow for anything to come back through it. He built it that way on purpose. He is only now discovering what it costs to have built it that way.

He thinks: it might matter and it might not.

The sentence arrives from months ago, something he said to Mara once, about a note in a seed packet, about the particular helplessness of sending something small into a world too large to guarantee it lands anywhere at all. He didn’t know, saying it then, how precisely it would come to describe the largest thing he’s ever sent anywhere.

He doesn’t check again. He decides, sitting on the bench with the confirmation already fading from the screen, that once is what he can honestly manage — that checking obsessively would turn an act of love into an act of surveillance, the very thing he’s spent his whole broken career failing to distinguish clearly enough.

He goes back to the row. The final harvest is nearly finished. Twenty-nine days left, by his own count, though the notice’s language always meant that number was a floor and not a ceiling.

He works until the light goes, and does not let himself imagine Lena’s face reading a card from a father she believes has been dead for six years. Some things, he has learned, you do because they’re right, not because you get to witness what they become.