16. Ethan
ETHAN
The garden store sat just off the main road, tucked behind a row of older buildings.
Gravel crunched under my boots as I stepped out of the truck, the late afternoon light settling in low and steady across the rows of plants lined up outside in their plastic containers.
October had done something to the light lately—turned it thinner, more golden. I didn’t mind it, actually.
I needed the quiet. Last night had been record attendance at the Butcher’s Den, which was good, but I had spent three hours standing next to Salem in a tiny dress, and my nervous system had not fully recovered and probably wasn’t going to without some assistance.
Quiet errands. Gravel underfoot. No one asking anything of me.
There was no music here. No rush of conversation bleeding in from somewhere else. Just the occasional sound of someone moving a ceramic pot across concrete, or the slow drag of a hose across gravel, or the creak of greenhouse panels shifting in the breeze.
I liked it here. It was close enough to the hardware store to walk on a lunch break, which I did more often than I’d admitted to anyone, including myself.
Today had a purpose, though—the truck bed needed filling.
Winterizing my grandmother’s garden before the real cold set in, getting it ready for whoever came after me.
There was something honest about a place like this.
Things either grew or they didn’t. You either showed up for them, or you didn’t.
The plants didn’t care about your intentions or how busy you’d been.
They just needed what they needed, and if you gave it, they responded. No negotiation. No gray area.
I grabbed a cart near the entrance and headed toward the back, past rows of flowers I didn’t have names for, past hanging baskets turning slow circles in the breeze that came through the open side panels of the greenhouse.
I knew what I needed—soil, plant food, a few replacements for the ones that hadn’t made it through the last bad stretch of weather.
The garden was down to its October bones, the way it always was this time of year, and it needed attention before the real cold set in.
The garden had never been mine. Not originally.
I thought about that more than I should have—that I’d inherited it half-dead and decided, without making a big formal decision about it, to just keep going.
To show up every few days and put in the work even when it felt pointless.
Even when nothing looked like it was visibly changing.
My grandmother had built it over thirty years, adding to it the way people add to things they love—slowly, without a plan, following whatever felt right.
Roses along the back fence because she liked the way they climbed.
A small herb section near the gate that had mostly given up by the time I got there, mostly just stubborn garlic, flowered now.
Black-eyed Susans in the corner that came back every year without being asked to.
I had kept all of it. Even the parts that were struggling. Especially those, maybe.
I was halfway down the fertilizer aisle when I spotted Lucy at the far end with her back to me, sunglasses pushed up on top of her head, even though the sun had already started to drop. She was studying something on the shelf.
I turned the cart and took the long way around.
It wasn’t avoidance. Or maybe it was, and that was okay.
Lucy knew the plan—everyone in my circle did.
Settle the estate, sell the house, finish the degree, and leave.
She’d known it since before any of this started, which was part of why last night had felt like a message I hadn’t asked to receive.
There were conversations that needed to happen eventually.
I found what I needed on the next aisle over and loaded everything in—soil, fertilizer, and a few replacement stakes that had been on the list for weeks.
I was almost at the end of the row, turning toward the front, ready to go home and think about nothing for the rest of the evening, when something caught my eye.
A small display of bulb bags tucked at the end of the shelf, hand-lettered signs above each bin.
October stock. The kind of thing you bought now and tucked away until the spring.
Black Ranunculus.
The corms in the bag were small, brown, and papery, shaped a little like tiny octopuses, which was objectively not a glamorous look. There was nothing about them that suggested what they eventually became—the layered, dark-spiraled blooms that looked almost black at the center, dramatic.
I stood there for a moment longer than I needed to.
I picked up a bag. Then, I picked up two more, and I wasn’t sure why.
Maybe the next owners would appreciate it. A bed worked and planted, something to look forward to in April that they hadn’t had to earn. That was a reasonable thing to do for a stranger. Thoughtful, even.
Maybe I’d take them with me. You could grow ranunculus in a city. People had window boxes. Balconies.
Neither explanation fully held up. I was standing there with three bags of bulbs and a cart full of winterizing supplies for a house I kept saying I was about to sell. It was a little weird, but I put them in the cart anyway.
I made my way up to the front, where the clerk scanned my haul. He was a man somewhere in his sixties with the kind of hands that looked like they’d been working soil since before I was born.
“You’ve been in a few times this season,” he said, not looking up from the register.
“Yeah. Few times.”
He nodded slowly, like he was doing math. “You’re putting in real work.”
“Trying to.”
He set the fertilizer aside and reached for the next bag, unhurried. “Most people come in once in the spring, buy too much, lose interest by June.”
I didn’t have much to say to that. I just nodded.
I paid, loaded everything into the truck, and drove back to the house with the windows cracked, the cool October air coming through steadily, smelling faintly of salt and something that meant the season had fully arrived.
The bulbs sat in a bag on the passenger seat the whole drive.
I didn’t let myself think about why.
I almost managed it.