Chapter Three
The bean trellis looked innocent until Zane handed me a roll of twine and said, “Don’t let it win.”
I stood in the narrow path between two raised beds, wearing my least-white sneakers, black shorts, and a green tank top I’d chosen because it made me look like a woman who understood summer.
Sweat already gathered behind my knees. Dirt had found the inside of one shoe.
A bee kept circling the purple flowers near the gate like it had a court order too.
“It’s string,” I said.
“It’s string with ambition.”
Zane crouched beside the row and caught a curling bean vine between two fingers.
He wore faded jeans, boots, and a sleeveless dark shirt that left both tattooed arms bare in the morning sun.
A line of ink disappeared under the cotton at his shoulder.
His hair looked lighter today, sun catching in it every time he turned his head, and the scruff along his jaw made him look like he’d shaved yesterday and regretted the concession.
My fingers tightened around the twine. Legally, I was a responsible adult completing court-ordered community service under appropriate supervision. In all areas involving Zane McCrae’s forearms, I was a public hazard.
He looped the vine gently around the twine. “You guide it up without snapping the stem. Loose enough to grow. Secure enough that it doesn’t fall over.”
“Why does everything in this garden sound like advice I’m not emotionally prepared to receive?”
His mouth twitched. “Because you’re dramatic before ten.”
“I’m observant before ten. The drama comes after lunch.”
Birdie laughed from the pepper bed. “That’s true. Yesterday she got philosophical about mulch at twelve-fifteen.”
“I was under duress,” I called.
Zane looked up at me, blue-green eyes steady under the brim of summer glare. “From bark dust?”
From you, I thought, and tightened my grip on the twine instead of saying anything stupid.
He held the vine in place. “Wrap it here.”
I crouched beside him and tried to look like a woman focused on legumes.
This was difficult because Zane’s shoulder was inches from mine, and the sun had brought out the clean sweat-and-pine smell of him under the dry garden air.
His hand dwarfed the green stem. Mine, in borrowed gloves again, hovered over the twine like I was being asked to defuse something.
“Here?” I asked.
“Closer to the joint.”
I moved the twine higher.
“Not that close.”
I lowered it.
“Daphne.”
“Yes?”
“You’re negotiating with a bean.”
“I’m trying to respect its boundaries.”
Tyler made a strangled sound from the compost bins.
Zane didn’t look away from the vine, but his voice went dry. “Tyler, if I turn around and you’re laughing instead of screening that compost, you’re doing the whole pile twice.”
“I’m emotionally screening,” Tyler called.
Gus said, “Boy, your emotions have rocks in them.”
Birdie made the kind of happy little sound that meant the morning had given her excellent gossip without making her ask for it.
I wrapped the twine around the stem, left a loose loop, and tied it to the trellis. “How’s that?”
Zane leaned closer to check.
The side of his arm brushed mine.
Bare skin brushed bare skin for one second, an accident caused by beans and civic improvement, and my breath thinned. My fingers pulled the knot too tight, and the stem bent sharply.
Zane’s hand covered mine.
“Easy,” he said.
The word sank under my skin.
I went still. The garden kept moving around us: bees in the flowers, Birdie clipping peppers, Tyler sifting compost with dramatic suffering, Gus dragging a bucket toward the fence. Zane’s palm stayed over my gloved fingers, steady and careful, while he loosened the knot.
“Loose enough to grow,” he said again, quieter.
I swallowed. “Right.”
He let go first, which was becoming one of his most annoying virtues.
I finished the tie properly this time and sat back on my heels.
My knees had dirt on them already, and it wasn’t even midmorning.
The black shorts had seemed like a practical choice in my bedroom.
Out here, they were mostly a way to confirm I’d never again have clean knees, clean shoes, or clean thoughts.
Zane stood and picked up the roll of twine. “Keep going down this side. I’ll check before you move to the next row.”
“I’m being trusted with string now?”
“You’ve earned intermediate string privileges.”
“That feels important.”
“It is.”
He walked toward the shed, and I watched him for two steps before I remembered I had a pulse, a court order, and an audience.
Birdie’s pepper clippers clicked. “You’re doing better today.”
I bent over the next vine. “Thank you. My standards are low, but they’re improving.”
“Your shoes survived the gate.”
“That was their only goal.”
“They’re practical.”
“They were beige once,” I said. “Now they’re whatever color regret becomes after exposure to soil.”
Birdie laughed and tucked a silver curl under the edge of her straw hat. Today her earrings were red enamel tomatoes, because apparently everyone except me had arrived at the P-Patch with theme awareness. “By Friday, you won’t even look down when dirt gets on you.”
“I’m not sure I’m ready for that level of personal growth.”
Gus came down the path with a five-gallon bucket in one hand. His gray beard swung over his faded shirt, and his boots thudded hard enough to make the boards along the bed creak. “Personal growth is overrated.”
Tyler lifted his head from the compost. “Isn’t this whole place about growth?”
“Plants,” Gus said. “Not feelings.”
I nodded. “Finally, a philosophy I can respect.”
Zane came out of the shed carrying a crate of drip-line parts and looked at all of us. “Is there a reason the beans stopped getting tied?”
“Workplace culture,” I said.
His gaze came to me. “Is that what we’re calling it?”
“Birdie said community is right in the name.”
Birdie smiled sweetly. “I did.”
“Community still works,” Zane said.
His voice was blunt, but the corner of his mouth moved. The almost-smile hit me harder than it should’ve. I turned back to the beans and guided another vine around the twine before my face could give me away.
For a while, I managed to work.
I didn’t manage it gracefully or with the easy competence Zane seemed to bring to every living thing, broken tool, or questionable volunteer decision.
But I tied the bean vines without strangling them, asked before touching anything that looked vegetable-adjacent, and drank water when Zane set a bottle on the bed rail beside me without saying a word.
The morning heated fast.
July settled over the P-Patch in bright layers. The sky was a hard polished blue. The pine shade shrank by inches. The tomato leaves gave off that sharp green smell every time the breeze moved. Somewhere beyond the south fence, past Zane’s land, Beargrass Lake flashed between the trees.
I kept catching glimpses of it.
A strip of blue and a scatter of light flashed through the trees, too pretty to be thinking about while I wore court-ordered dirt on my knees.
Zane caught me looking the third time.
He stood beside the drip-line crate, one hand braced on his hip, sun along the tattoos on his forearm. “You need a break?”
“No.” I pulled another vine toward the trellis. “I was admiring the view.”
His eyes narrowed a fraction, but not like he was annoyed. More like he was trying to decide whether to ask which view.
I absolutely wasn’t going to clarify.
“The lake’s that way, right?” I asked, because apparently I had chosen ruin.
Zane’s gaze moved past the fence, through the pines. “Beargrass.”
“It’s closer than I thought.”
“Through my land, yes.”
My fingers tightened around the twine.
His land. His lake access. His voice saying it like the words had roots.
The way he said it tugged at something low in my chest. Zane was the P-Patch director.
He signed my hours. He moved through the city garden like a man responsible for every hose, fence board, and tender green thing inside it.
But the land beyond the fence was different.
It was his, and the space between us sharpened around the word.
Tyler wandered too close with a bucket of screened compost. “Are we talking about swimming? Because I support that direction for today’s labor.”
“We’re not swimming,” Zane said.
Tyler looked genuinely wounded. “Not even as rehabilitation?”
“You painted a parking meter. You don’t need aquatic rehabilitation.”
“It was artistic civil disobedience.”
“It was orange.”
“It had a lightning bolt.”
Gus shook his head without pausing over the fence repair. “City should’ve made you paint all the meters. At least then you’d have a skill.”
Birdie lifted her basket of peppers. “Nobody is swimming during crew hours.”
The words during crew hours made my stomach dip.
Zane looked at me.
I looked back at the bean vine.
The sun pressed hotter against my shoulders.
By noon, my green tank top clung to my back, my hair had escaped the twist I’d stabbed it into with two pins and misplaced hope, and a thin scratch marked one shin from a bean stake I had personally offended.
I’d moved from trellis work to helping Zane lay drip line along the row, which meant kneeling beside him while he showed me where the emitters needed to sit.
“Point it toward the root zone,” Zane said.
I crouched beside him, one knee in the path, one foot braced against the bed frame. “I’m starting to think everything here has a root zone.”
“Most plants do.”
“Do people?”
His hand paused on the black tubing.
I regretted the question the second it escaped. It sounded like something a woman said right before she admitted too much to a man who still didn’t know why she was here.
Zane glanced at me. “Sometimes.”
My throat tightened.
Gus’s voice drifted from the fence. “Some people are all weeds.”
Tyler said, “I feel like that’s about me.”
“It can be,” Gus said.
The moment broke, and I was grateful enough to laugh.