He wakes the next morning in the room he still, formally, rents from a dead man, and lies still for a while before deciding, as he always does, that lying still changes nothing and getting up does.

There is nowhere to go this morning. That fact arrives slowly, in pieces, the way large facts do — not as a single blow but as a series of small absences discovered one at a time. No rows to check. No watering can to fill at a standpipe that belongs, as of yesterday, to a clearance crew and the machinery that will follow it. No cold frame to open, no compost to turn, no coffee at 09:15 on a bench that no longer exists in any form he can sit on.

He gets up anyway. He makes the coffee, in this room, on a small ring he rarely uses, and finds it tastes like nothing in particular, which he supposes is honest — coffee has never been the point, only ever the shape around the point, and this morning the shape has nowhere left to hold.

Mara comes at nine, as they’d arranged, and they sit together at the small table by the window, which faces a wall rather than a row of seedlings, and talk about nothing important for a while, because nothing important is exactly what the morning can bear.

Before she leaves, he reaches into his coat — the same coat, the pocket he folded the clearance notice into a month ago — and takes out two seeds, wrapped in a small twist of paper he made last night, alone, unable to sleep.

“Owen’s,” he says. “The ones I never identified. I kept two out of the tin.”

“Why only two?”

“Because two is honest,” he says. “I don’t have a garden to plant a whole packet in. I have a coat pocket, and whatever soil I find next, if I find any at all. Two is what a coat pocket can carry without pretending to be something larger.”

She doesn’t ask him what he’ll do with them. She has learned, across everything, that some answers only exist in the doing, not in the saying beforehand.

He walks her to the door, and after she’s gone he stands a while at the window that faces a wall, the two seeds back in his pocket, small and light and entirely unremarkable to anyone who might see them.

He does not know yet where he’ll plant them, or whether there will be time.

He knows only that he still has them, that he is still, after everything, someone who carries a seed rather than someone who has stopped — and for this particular morning, with nowhere to go and everything gone, that turns out to be enough to get him through it, and into whatever comes after.