They gather on what everyone has quietly agreed, without saying so directly, is the last full day the garden will look like itself.

Daniel and Priya come in the morning, and stay through the afternoon, and Priya brings food that isn’t strictly necessary and is exactly right anyway — something warm, shared out of a single dish the way people used to eat before efficiency became a virtue applied even to meals. They work the beds together, not urgently, just thoroughly: every seed worth saving goes into envelopes, labelled in Elias’s small cramped hand, distributed evenly between his tin and a second one he’s given Mara, so that whatever happens next, the collection isn’t held in only one place.

“Twenty-six varieties,” he says, counting the final envelope into the tin. “More than I started with. That’s not nothing, for seven years.”

“It’s not nothing at all,” Priya says.

They dig up what can survive transplanting — a handful of herbs, the calendula, cuttings from the climbing rose that Elias takes with more care than anything else, wrapping the cut ends in damp cloth like something that might still, against the odds, take root somewhere else. Daniel has a strip of soil behind his own block, small, city-approved, unglamorous. It isn’t the garden. It will hold some of what the garden was, which Elias says, watching the cuttings get wrapped, is the most any of this was ever going to manage anyway.

Mara spends part of the afternoon simply sitting, watching the four of them move through the beds, and finds herself doing the thing she’s learned to do with everything that matters now: memorising it, deliberately, the way you memorise something you already know won’t hold its exact shape past today.

Near evening, when Daniel and Priya have gone, she and Elias sit at the bench with the last of the light, the beds around them stripped back to something closer to their original bareness — not empty, but cleared, deliberate, the specific tidiness of a leaving rather than an abandonment.

“How do you feel,” she asks.

“Lighter than I expected,” he says. “And sadder than I can find words for. Both, at once. You taught me that’s allowed.”

“I had a good teacher for it.”

He almost smiles, and takes her hand, and they watch the last light go from gold to blue to nearly nothing, the way it has all summer, indifferent, exact, and entirely unbothered by what tomorrow is bringing.