"You said chaos keeps taking and breaking until there's nothing left." She jabs a finger at me. Has to angle it upward at about forty-five degrees, which would be funny if her eyes weren't glassing over with a shine she's clearly furious about. "What exactly do you think I am, Flynn? What have I been to you this whole time? Just chaos that hasn't finished wrecking your stuff yet?"
My throat tightens. The answer is no. The answer is she's the first thing in years that made the rigid lines of my life feel like something other than a cage. But the crater is still smoking behind me and the words won't rearrange themselves into anything that isn't jagged.
"I think you don't respect boundaries."
Wrong words.
Her whole body goes rigid. From her mud-crusted toes to her wild, sleep-flattened hair, every muscle locks. She grabs the nearest thing within reach. A forty-pound bag of premium enchanted potting soil, stacked against her porch railing. She shouldn't be able to lift it. She hoists it to her hip like it weighs nothing.
"I don't respectboundaries?"
"Junia, put that down."
"I broke my back mixing your soil. I hiked into a magical death ravine for your loam. I fought beetles and root monsters and stone gargoyles. I quoted subsection nine, paragraphfourteen of the HOA charter to save yourarchway." She shifts the bag higher. Her arms tremble. Not from the weight. From everything underneath it. "And you're standing in my yard telling me I don't respect boundaries?"
"That's not what I-"
"You kissed me against that trellis eight hours ago."
The words hit harder than a warband siege hammer. My runes flare. Green light splashes across her face, illuminating the tear track cutting through the potting soil on her cheek. One single line. She swipes it with her shoulder, leaving a smear.
"You held me on that tarp and told me my chaos makes you feel alive. Those were your exact words. And now your rosebush dies and suddenly I'm the enemy again? Suddenly I'm just the messy neighbor who doesn't read labels?"
"The evidence-"
"Screw your evidence!" She swings the potting soil bag like a battering ram. Not at me. At the stack of empty pots beside the porch. They explode in a cascade of terra cotta shrapnel. Shards spray across the steps. Soil erupts in a brown mushroom cloud that billows between us, coating everything.
I don't flinch. Potting soil settles across my shoulders, in my hair, across the tee shirt that already carries last night's grass stains.
Junia stands in the wreckage, heaving. Broken pot fragments crunch under her socked feet. Blood wells from a small cut on her ankle where a shard caught her. She doesn't notice.
"I didn't touch your rosebush. I would never. I know what it means to you. I know you planted it the month after you left the warbands. I know you talk to it when you think nobody's listening. I know you adjusted its trellis wires three times last Tuesday because I waswatching, Flynn, because I observe you all the time, because I-"
She stops. Clamps her jaw shut. The unfinished sentence hangs in the soil-dusted air between us, heavier than anything she could throw.
"Go home."
Two words. Barely a whisper.
"Junia."
"Go. Home." She bends down and picks up the torn potting soil bag. Dark loam spills down her tank top, over her stomach, pooling in the creases of her sleep shorts. "Go measure something. Go rake something. Go be perfect and alone on your side of the fence."
She climbs her porch steps. The cut on her ankle leaves small red prints on the wood. The screen door screams on its hinges.
It slams.
Locks click. One. Two. The deadbolt she installed herself, crooked, because she didn't use a level and I never offered to fix it.
I stand in her yard surrounded by broken pots and scattered soil and the ghost of a sentence she refused to finish. Potting mix cakes in my hair. A terra cotta shard sits on the toe of my boot, perfectly triangular, like a tiny accusation.
From somewhere inside the house comes a sound. Muffled. Quick. Cut short.
She's crying.
I put the shard in my cargo shorts pocket and walk back through the gate.
The house is too quiet.
