Chapter 15 15

Chapter 15 15
Chapter 15
Daphne's POV

He left the garden the way he had entered it — without announcement, without a formal end to the conversation. He simply looked at the rose wall once more, said something brief about the tools being in the storage room adjacent to the door, and walked back inside. The door closed behind him and the garden was mine again, quieter than before but different now. Changed by having been shared, the way spaces are.

I stood there for a moment with the dirty gloves in my hands.

Then I went and found the tools.

The storage room was narrow and dim, shelves on both sides holding the accumulated evidence of a garden once properly kept. Trowels, pruning shears, a coil of twine gone stiff with age, clay pots in varying sizes stacked with the careful logic of someone who expected to use them again. Everything dusty but intact. I took what I thought I'd need for the afternoon and went back outside.

I worked until the light went thin and my knees had stopped being merely uncomfortable and started making themselves known in a way that suggested stopping. I had cleared the south bed completely by then and turned the soil at the edges to see what was underneath. Better than expected. Dark and loamy, the kind of soil that had been fed properly at some point and remembered it. Things could grow here. Things had grown here and would again, given time and a reasonable amount of attention.

I put the tools back and went inside and washed the dirt from my arms at the basin.

At dinner Mrs. Dorothy mentioned, without looking up from the tray she was arranging, that the Alpha had asked her to tell me the tools were mine to use as I liked. That I should feel free to order seeds or cuttings through her if I decided what I wanted to plant. She said it in the tone of someone relaying a simple household message and nothing more, and I received it the same way, and neither of us acknowledged that it was, in the context of everything, a quietly significant thing to have been told.

After she left I sat with it.

He had gone back inside and thought about the garden. Had thought about me in the garden, specifically — about what I would need to continue. Had told Mrs. Dorothy to pass it along rather than tell me himself, which was either a matter of habit or a matter of not wanting to make more of it than it was. I couldn't tell which. Probably both.

I went to bed with soil still faintly under my fingernails despite the washing, the kind that settles into the small creases of the hands and doesn't come out entirely with one attempt. I didn't mind it. It felt like proof of something. That I had been somewhere, done something, made a small and incremental difference to a patch of ground that had been waiting for someone to pay attention to it.

Sleep came easier than it had the nights before.

I woke to grey light and birdsong — actual birdsong, something small and repetitive from the direction of the walled garden, which I hadn't heard before and which made the morning feel different before I was fully conscious enough to understand why.

I dressed and went down the corridor before Mrs. Dorothy came with breakfast, which I had not done before. The door to the garden was unlocked. I stepped through into the cold morning air and stood in the middle of the cleared bed and looked at everything in the early light.

It looked better than I had expected. The progress from yesterday was visible in a way that felt disproportionate to the hours spent — sometimes work reads larger in fresh eyes than it does while you're doing it. The cleared soil had a different quality in morning light, something almost promising about it.

I was crouching at the edge of the south wall, examining what I was increasingly certain was the base of a second rose, when I heard the door.

I assumed Mrs. Dorothy. I didn't turn around immediately, just called out that I would be in for breakfast shortly, and then registered the silence that followed as the wrong kind of silence for Mrs. Dorothy.

I turned.

It was not Mrs. Dorothy.

It was a woman I had not seen before — perhaps fifty, elegantly dressed in a way that spoke of habit rather than effort, with dark hair going to silver at the temples and a face that was assembled from the same bones as the Alpha's but arranged with more warmth. She was standing just inside the garden door with her hands clasped in front of her, looking at me with an expression I couldn't immediately categorise.

Not hostile. Not surprised, exactly. More like someone who had been told something and had come to see if the telling matched the reality.

I stood up slowly.

She looked at the cleared bed. Then at the tools laid neatly by the wall. Then at me again.

"You've been busy," she said.

The exact words he had used yesterday. The same cadence. I understood now where he had learned them.

"I hope it's alright," I said carefully. "He said I could."

Her eyes moved to the south wall where the lavender had been. Something shifted in her face at that — a softening so brief I might have imagined it.

"The lavender was mine," she said. "I planted it the second year I was here." A pause. "It's hard to establish. Most people can't get it to take in this climate."

I looked at the grey stems. "The roots are still alive," I said. "Dormant, not dead. With the right conditions it could come back."

She looked at me steadily for a moment. The morning was cold and neither of us moved.

"I'm Vera," she said.

"I know," I said. "I'm Daphne."

"I know," she said.

And we stood in the garden his mother had planted and I had begun to restore, in the early grey light, while the small bird continued its repetitive song somewhere above the stone wall, and neither of us said anything else for a while.

It was not uncomfortable.

That itself felt like something worth noting.