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A laugh escaped me before I could stop it. “I swear to God, Barrett.”

“What?”

“What kind of dirt?”

His expression changed slightly. The amusement faded as he considered the question. “From the south clearing. It smelled right.”

I frowned. “Right, how?”

Barrett glanced at the cutting. “Like the plant does when it flowers. Sweeter, maybe, but the same underneath.”

I stared at him. “But it wasn’t flowering.”

He went still. “No.”

“So how did you know?”

Barrett looked back at the tray. “Don’t know.”

I pulled out the chair opposite him and sat. “You just described something that’s scientifically impossible.”

“Wasn’t scientifically impossible until you said it was.”

“Barrett.”

He sighed and put the sandpaper down.

I folded my arms on the table. “You keep saying things feel right. The soil felt right. The cutting felt viable. Yesterday, you knew there was water beneath the eastern ridge before we found the spring. You have jars above your stove containing plants you can’t identify, some of which you’ve combined in preparations that make botanical sense even though you claim nobody taught you to do it.”

“Nobody did.”

“I believe you.”

That caught him off guard. His eyes lifted to mine.

“I didn’t at first,” I admitted. “I thought you’d learned more than you realized. Folk knowledge, family knowledge, things you’d picked up from people around town and forgotten the source of. But that’s not what this is, is it?”

Barrett’s brow furrowed.

I touched one of the silver leaves. “You genuinely don’t know how you know.”

For a moment, the only sound in the kitchen was the faint buzz of insects outside the open window.

Then Barrett shook his head. “No.”

The emotion that moved through me felt dangerously close to wonder. Not the academic excitement of finding an anomaly I could document and explain. This was the older feeling, the one I’d had as a child beside Grandma, kneeling in damp grass while she showed me how a fern unfurled.

The feeling I’d almost forgotten existed.

I looked at Barrett’s enormous hands resting on the table beside mine. “How long has this been happening?”

He rubbed his thumb across one of the old scars in the wood. “Long time.”

“Before or after the Frankenpunch?”

His hand stilled.

And just like that, I realized I’d never asked.