Everett
She'sstillhere.
That's the thing I keep coming back to while I'm doing the afternoon check on the bees. She's been here four hours. She checked her phone once. She pulled it out while I was in the barn, put it face-down on the porch rail, and hasn't touched it since. Three hours ago. It's still sitting there. She's crouched in the kitchen garden talking to my dog, Burl, about basil.
She doesn't know I can hear her.
"This one's taller than the others," she's saying. "Is that a problem? Should we be concerned?"
Burl shifts his weight. Sighs from somewhere deep.
"You're right," she says. "Probably fine."
I pull the lid off the second hive box and go back to work.
I live alone by choice, not default. I have neighbors I like, a market stall, Burl and the bees. That's a full life and I built it deliberately. I stopped bringing people here after Claire — notfrom grief, or not only, but because I saw clearly once she was gone that I'd let her in before I understood what I was offering.
This isn't just a house. You can't separate it from me the way you can separate a person from an apartment or a city. The farm is the whole thing. Bringing someone here is bringing them into something I can't offer halfway.
So I don't, as a rule.
But there was something in how she saidI didn't get to know she was okay firstand I invited her home and now she's been here four hours talking to my dog about basil.
The rabbit is in the barn, asleep, safe and sound.
Fig, my cat, drops off the fence post and lands near my feet. Sniffs the air. Decides I'm not interesting enough and moves toward the garden.
Toward Sloane.
Fig doesn't like people. She tolerates me because I fill her bowl and I don't make a fuss about it. She and Burl reached some truce years ago. Visitors she either ignores entirely or leaves the property over, depending on her assessment of them.
She walks up to Sloane and sits two feet away and stares.
Sloane must feel the cat’s gaze. She looks up. "Oh. Hello."
Fig stares and blinks.
"I don't have anything for you."
Fig considers this for a moment. Then walks forward and bumps her head against Sloane's knee, once, hard, before turning and walking away like nothing happened.
Sloane looks after her. "Was that a threat or a greeting?"
"Compliment," I say, from the bee boxes. "
When I finish with the bees, she's standing at the garden's edge studying the rows like she's trying to crack the logic of them.
"Why are these together?" She points at the tomatoes and basil.
"They help each other. Basil keeps aphids off the tomatoes. Tomatoes give the basil shade in the worst heat."
She thinks about this. "So it's mutual."
"Most things are, if you set them up right."
Solane… She's something, this woman. I noticed at the market. Hard not to. She'd stood at my stall chin up, arms at her sides, taking in everything with those eyes that don't miss much — and then she'd looked at the rabbit and all that composure had gone somewhere. Just briefly. Just enough.
She'd noticed me too. I'd clocked that, the way she looked at my hands and then deliberately didn't. I hadn't minded. I mind less than I expected to.
