Chapter 7: What the Garden Knew
Marcus flew in three weeks later.
We had agreed on a Saturday — neutral ground, no pressure, just coffee at my kitchen table.
But when I opened the door and saw him standing on the porch in a gray jacket, a little too formal for the occasion, holding a paper bag from a bakery like he wasn't sure whether to bring something or not, I felt something shift quietly in my chest.
He had Adriel's eyes.
Not the color — his were darker — but the steadiness in them.
The way they didn't move away.
"Hi," he said.
"Hi," I said.
"You brought pastries."
"I didn't know if you'd eaten.
I also didn't know if bringing food was strange.
My daughters told me it was fine and then argued about it for twenty minutes."
I stepped back to let him in.
"It's fine."
He stood in my kitchen doorway and looked around slowly, the way someone does when a place they've imagined finally becomes real.
"He was here a lot?" Marcus asked.
"Almost every Sunday after church.
He liked that chair." I nodded toward the one by the window.
"He said the light was better there."
Marcus walked over and looked at the chair.
He didn't sit in it.
He just looked at it for a moment, then turned away.
"I brought something," he said.
He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out an envelope.
"From his house.
His neighbor — the one on the other side — found it tucked inside a book when they were helping clear things out.
It had your name on it."
I took the envelope.
My name was written on the front in Adriel's handwriting.
Not *Nora*.
Not *the neighbor*.
Just *Nora*, as if he had always known exactly who I was to him.
I opened it at the table while Marcus poured the coffee — he found the mugs without asking, opened the right cabinet on the first try, which made us both go quiet for a second.
The note inside was short.
Half a page.
*"I used to watch you from the garden when you didn't know I was looking.
Not in a strange way — I hope you know that.
I just liked seeing you move around in the kitchen, or come out to get the mail, or stand on the porch in the evening when you thought no one was watching.
You had your mother's way of going still when you were thinking.
She used to do that.
Stand very still and look at something no one else could see.
I recognized it the first week you moved in.
That was when I knew for certain."*
I set the note down.
"He knew the first week," I said.
Marcus sat down across from me.
"He told me.
He said he almost knocked on your door that first month.
Then he talked himself out of it.
Then he saw you at the bus stop one Sunday and — "
"He was at the bus stop," I said.
"I thought I found him.
I thought I was the one who pulled over."
Marcus shook his head slowly.
"He told me he'd been watching to see which way you drove on Sunday mornings.
He figured out you went to church.
He started walking to that bus stop three Sundays in a row hoping you'd offer him a ride."
I stared at him.
"He planned it," I said.
"He planned it," Marcus confirmed.
"He said he couldn't just knock on your door and say what he needed to say.
He thought if you got to know him first — if you chose him first, without knowing — then maybe it would be easier to tell you later."
"And then he never told me."
"And then he never told me," Marcus agreed quietly.
"That part he wasn't proud of."
I looked out the window at Adriel's garden next door.
The tomato cages were still standing.
Someone had watered the beds recently — the soil was dark.
"He used to bring me vegetables from that garden," I said.
"I know.
He mentioned it every time we talked." Marcus wrapped both hands around his mug.
"He said it was the only way he knew how to give you something without explaining why."
I thought about every bunch of tomatoes left on my porch.
Every paper bag of green beans.
Every time I'd called through his screen door to say thank you and he'd waved it off like it was nothing.
It was never nothing.
"He was trying to take care of me," I said.
"He was trying to take care of you," Marcus said.
May you like
"From the very beginning."
We sat there for a while, the two of us, with the coffee going warm between our hands and the garden visible through the window, and neither of us needed to say anything else for a long time.
