The word lands hard. She flinches. Just barely. Just enough that something behind my sternum cracks, but I stomp it flat because the crater is right there, gaping and raw, and my rosebush is dead on the grass.
"I planted that bush eleven years ago. I grafted the rootstock by hand. Pruned it on a lunar calendar. It bloomed fourteen days early this year because I got the nitrogen ratio perfect.Perfect."
"Flynn."
"It was the one thing in this entire neighborhood that was exactly right."
She takes a step forward. I take one back.
The move surprises us both. Her hand hovers in the space between us, fingers still stained with last night. My boot heel presses into the soft crater and loose soil crumbles inward.
"Don't."
"Let me look at the soil. I can test it. If it's my fertilizer, there'll be a specific magical signature and I'll-"
"You'll what. Fix it?" I gesture at the shredded canes. The crushed blooms browning in the morning air. "Chaos doesn't fixthings. Chaos just keeps taking and breaking and spreading until there's nothing left to destroy."
The words come out louder than I intend. Somewhere down the street, a screen door slams. A neighbor's face appears in a window.
Junia's chin lifts. Her jaw sets. The confusion in her eyes hardens into something else. Something hotter.
"You're blaming me."
"I'm identifying a pattern."
"You'reblamingme. After last night. After everything we-"
"Last night doesn't change soil chemistry."
She stares at me. The pink morning light catches the potting soil still dusted across her collarbone. Her fingers curl into fists at her sides.
"Fine."
One word. Quiet. Controlled. She turns on her heel, socked feet squelching through the wet grass, and walks back toward her property line without looking back.
The fence gate bangs shut behind her.
I stand alone in my perfect lawn, in the hole where something beautiful once was.
I should let her go.
Every survival instinct from the warbands screams it. Disengage. Fortify. Return to the perimeter. Let the chaos burn itself out on the other side of the fence where it belongs.
My boots carry me after her anyway.
"We're not finished."
She's halfway across her yard, weaving between the obstacle course of terra cotta pots and hanging baskets and the weird little mushroom sculptures she sticks everywhere like territory markers. She doesn't slow down.
"Oh, we're absolutely finished."
"You can't just walk away from a property damage discussion."
She whirls. A pot of trailing ivy wobbles on its stand behind her.
"A property damagediscussion? Is that what we're calling this? Because from where I'm standing, it sounded a lot more like an orc screaming at me that I'm a walking natural disaster."
"I didn't say that."
