They Will Be Happy Here

The man did not move. He knelt by the small patch of turned earth, his gaze fixed on the tiny splash of green. It was a fragile thing, no more than a promise, but it held the weight of a world. It was his.

From across the garden, amidst the tangle of her own work, the woman saw him. She saw not just his stillness, but the angle of his head, the focus of his attention. She had seen that look before, in the mirror of her own heart when she tended to her own blooms. She rose, wiping the soil from her hands onto her trousers, and walked the familiar path between the beds, her steps soft on the earth.

She did not speak as she approached, stopping a respectful distance away. Her eyes followed his to the ground. She saw it, then. The shoot. It was so new it was barely there, a whisper of life.

A slow smile touched her lips. It was a smile of recognition, of understanding. He had not merely tended the garden; he had added to it. He had brought something of himself.

“You brought them from far away,” she said. It was not a question.

He looked up at her, his expression unreadable but for the quiet intensity in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. His voice was low and little used.

She looked back down at the shoot, then at the vast, nurturing space of the garden around them. “They will be happy here.”

He nodded once, slowly, his gaze returning to the green. A future, he realized, was not something you found. It was something you planted.