Page 26 of Guarded by My Gargoyle

“And the aster is original to the area.”

He considered that, and she waited for him to argue. Instead he nodded once. “True.”

She laughed. That almost-smile appeared again, so slight she would have missed it a week ago. She looked down at the old rose between them, at the tiny green shoot on wood that had looked dead an hour ago. Progress. One step at a time.

CHAPTER 9

Maris was still working at six. Garrick had left her working to take a conference call, then spent the next hour convincing himself he shouldn’t go back. But it was getting late and she was still there. Unable to resist any longer, he returned to the rose garden and found her on her knees in the last of the afternoon light, elbow-deep in a hole.

“You’re late,” he said.

“I’m working.” She didn’t look up. “Different thing.”

“It’s past six.”

“Is it?” She sat back, wiped her forehead, and left a streak of dirt across it. “Huh.”

Toby was missing. He’d expected her to leave at some point and return with the small serious boy who usually trailed her, probably kneeling nearby with a trowel of his own and a running list of questions.

“Where’s Toby?”

“At Dot’s. Or rather, Dot’s grandma’s.” She dug again. “Mrs. Crenshaw offered to take him a few afternoons a week. She’s got half the class over there most days apparently so there’s a house full of kids and a goat.” She shook her head. “I didn’t think he’d go for it, but Dot told him to come so he decided to give it a chance. And I get to see if I can get more done without a five-year-old asking me if worms have faces.”

“Do they?”

“Have faces? No. He was very disappointed.” She glanced up at last, and gave him a cautious look. “He wanted to go, but I think he likes it here better. He asked twice this morning when we were coming to your garden and got quiet when I said not today.” She shrugged a shoulder. “Sorry. He gets attached.”

“He’s welcome here any time.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“He’s always welcome,” he said again, and this time he made sure she heard that he really meant it and it wasn’t just courtesy. “Any afternoon. He can stay. He doesn’t get in the way.”

She studied him a moment longer than the words needed. Then she nodded, once, and went back to her hole. He understood that he’d said the right thing, and she’d accepted it.

He crouched beside her. “What are we doing?”

“I am moving this rose. It’s been planted in the wrong place for twenty years, and it’s been miserable and stubborn about it the whole time.” She grunted, levering the trowel under a root. “I’m relocating it before I lose the light.”

“Give it here.”

“Garrick—”

“You’ve been on your knees since eight. Your hands are shaking.” They were. He’d watched the trowel wobble. “You want to move the rose. Tell me where.”

She looked at him for a beat, and he could see her running through the argument she always ran, the one where accepting help meant something she didn’t want it to mean. Then he watched her decide, for once, to accept it.

“There.” She pointed at a spot near the old bench-gap. “I dug the receiving hole an hour ago. Get under the whole root ball. Don’t tear it.”

He got under the whole root ball and he didn’t tear it. She directed him with the competence of a female who knew exactly how something should go into the ground, and he did precisely what she said. It worked as well as it had the day before. The two of them fell into a rhythm with no wasted words in it, and she backfilled while he held the plant steady, and she talked him through it and he learned.

It was, he thought, the most peace he’d had on these grounds in twenty years. He was kneeling in wet dirt while a small dirty woman told him he was doing it wrong and then that he was doing it right.

Earlier that day she had told him about a courtyard in Charleston, and about people who’d had a garden redone because it was time for something new. He had said nothing then. There was a folder on his desk with Palisade Resort Group printed across the front of it and a ridge above Miller’s Creek inside, and he hadn’t said anything about that either. Was he going to?

By the time she firmed the last of the soil around the crown, the light was slanting through the surrounding bushes. They were both filthy to the elbows and slower than they’d been an hour before.

“There.” She pressed both palms into the earth around the rose in a small final blessing. “Now it can be miserable somewhere it’ll actually thrive.”