“Just like that?”
“You need your space and this is your yard. All of it,” Ezra says.
I turn and look at Ezra and Lex. Ezra's grinning wide enough that I almost smile back. Lex shoves his hands in his pockets.
“Thank you,” I say.
Lex tips his head toward the empty planter beside me. “Why don't you make a start now?”
I pull on the gloves waiting on the bench and get my hands in the soil. Aubrey stands next to me as I take a punnet and wriggleout the seedling. We work side by side and the morning goes with us.
“Like this.” I show Aubrey to make a finger-width hole, roots down and spread, not bunched, soil firmed around the collar without packing it tight. “If you pack it too hard the roots can't push through. You want it snug, not strangled.”
He watches my hands and does the same with his own seedling. He gets the pressure right on the first try.
“Deeper,” I say. “The collar wants to sit at soil level, not above it. If it's above, it dries out and you lose the plant before it's had a chance.”
He adjusts without comment. Then: “Is this right?”
I lean over and look. “Yes.”
“Hm.” He firms the soil around his seedling the way I showed him, two thumbs pressing in a slow circle, the same pressure I used.
Dad would have said something about runners. About how strawberries send out little arms looking for new ground, how you have to let them or they get frustrated and stop fruiting. About how some plants need room to reach.
The old me knew things like this. I'd half-convinced myself she'd been burned out of me inthatplace. But she's in my hands right now, pressing roots into dirt.
Maybe it can be warm again.
The strawberry pot is too good for inside. It needs to be where I can see it. It needs to be on the patio, near the chair, somewhere I can watch it from.
I get my hands under the rim and Aubrey gets the other side and we lift together and the thing is heavier than it looks, terracotta dense and the soil packed full. We make it two steps before Ezra appears and lifts it straight out of our hands, Lex right behind him already clearing the path to the patio.
I follow them across the lawn and go tense where Ezra goes to set the pot. “Not there!”
Ezra only straightens and gives me one of his bright smiles. “Your wish is my command. Just tell me where and that's where it'll go.”
My shoulders release. I look for the perfect place and point.
“There.” Ezra sets it down and I look at it and it's wrong. “No. Left. A bit more.” He shifts it. Still wrong. “Back slightly.”
I look at it for a long moment. The rightness of it settles into me slowly, until something I didn’t know was tense goes quiet.
“Good place, Espie. I like it,” he says.
The patio door opens and Kev steps outside.
I look over his shoulder expecting Sera.
She's not there.
Just the open doorway and the quiet house behind him.
I turn back to the strawberry pot. The light is right. Everything out here is right.
Except for the cold space she left behind.
Chapter Thirty
