They let him walk it once more before the clearance proper begins, which he understands is not required by any protocol and is offered anyway, by the same foreman, in the particular quiet way that small mercies get offered by people whose job otherwise allows for none.

He walks it in the order he always has, the order that hasn’t changed in seven years regardless of what the day required of him — the beet bed first, empty now, turned soil dark and ordinary. The brassica rows, cut back to stubble at the final harvest. The cold frame, glass clean, holding nothing. The south bed, where a row of dry stakes and jute is all that’s left to say that something climbed there once, reached for string, found it, held on for exactly as long as it was built to hold.

He stops longest at the shed, empty now too, everything worth keeping already moved to Daniel’s strip of soil or into the two tins he and Mara carry between them. The bare shelves still smell faintly of everything that used to be stored there — seed, soil, the specific mineral sweetness of a place that spent seven years being useful in the smallest possible way.

He does not hurry. He has decided, walking in from the gate this morning, that he will not give the day the shape of an ending it hasn’t earned from him — that he will walk this the way he has walked it every ordinary morning, at the same unhurried pace, because the pace itself is the last thing that’s fully his to control.

Mara walks beside him without speaking, which he’s grateful for. Daniel and Priya wait at the fence, having come to witness rather than to help — there is, today, nothing left to help with.

At the seinpaal he stops and looks up at the climbing rose’s old path along the strut, most of it cut back and taken with the cuttings, a few stubborn inches still clinging to the metal that nobody thought worth removing.

“It’ll come back somewhere,” he says. “Something will. It always finds a way to go where it wants.”

He doesn’t know if he means the rose.

He turns, finally, and walks back toward the gate at the same pace he arrived, and does not look back at the beds a second time, because he has already looked at them, thoroughly, for seven years, and there is nothing left in a final glance that the previous ones didn’t already hold.

The foreman waits at the fence with the tablet, patient, professionally still.

Elias signs what needs signing, and steps through the gate for the last time, into a street that has no idea what it’s just watched end.