Overlooked
Five Years Later
The door closed with a quiet click.
Niles shifted the wicker basket, its weight a familiar ache in the crook of his arm.
A fine mist had turned the air to gauze, muffling sound but amplifying scents until he breathed a cocktail of damp soil, sweet mulch, and the last hint of lawnmower exhaust. Early autumn.
The scent of Tuesday. Thirteen houses. Thirteen efficient transactions.
‘Oh, it’s you.’
‘Here you are.’
‘Thank you.’
‘Have a lovely day.’
Not one of those words meant anything. They were just noise filling the seconds while swapping Book A for Book B.
Niles had built his fortune by making transactions frictionless. He’d optimised his own life right alongside his work, but now he missed those awkward pauses, the stumbling conversations, the expression on someone’s face that said, ‘I’m listening.’
Book basket on his arm, he drifted down the hill.
The path through the park was a tunnel of shedding trees.
Last week, they’d been a riot of amber, scarlet, russet, and gold.
Now, the leaves were crisp, brown relics, raked into neatish piles.
He loved their rustle, but to disturb them felt like a demand for attention he had no right to.
With a sigh, he stayed in the centre of the path and hastened his steps until he reached his home and passed through the carriage arch into silence. Not the inattentive quiet of his book round, nor the public calm of the park, but a private, curated stillness. His silence.
He’d bought the house with its three barns and central courtyard after nothing more than an online perusal, a ramshackle fairy tale at the end of the High Street.
The architect he’d hired had taken one look at the weed-filled square and seen convenient parking.
Niles had seen a glade. Trees and shrubs that marked the passing of the seasons, offering joy in spring, shade in summer, colour in autumn, and an austere beauty during the darkest, coldest months of the year.
He’d spent that first autumn talking to arborists and garden designers, and the winter digging up the courtyard and improving the soil.
Now his glade was a reality, a captive piece of woodland in a stone embrace.
He’d planted a delicate birch, a brooding spruce, a fire-leaved maple, and a ginkgo that marked autumn by turning its leaves the colour of antique gold.
They, together with an elegant rowan and a young oak were his family, his audience.
So what if he was the one person in town nobody noticed?
He had his books and the trees for company.
Leaves enough for a lifetime.