Chapter 3
Saoirse
"You want to move his session outside," Gemma repeated, like she thought I might be joking. "To the community garden."
"I want to move his session outside to the community garden."
"That's not really standard rehab protocol."
"Neither is grief, and that's half of what I'm treating.
" I stacked a set of resistance bands into my bag along with a rolled towel and a blood pressure cuff, prepping for the afternoon.
"His body's healing on schedule. Better than schedule, actually.
What's not healing is everything a clinical room can't touch.
I want to give him something to do with his hands that isn't exercises.
Something that grows instead of just gets measured. "
"You're going to put a combat medic with a Purple Heart in a flower bed."
"I'm going to put a man who's spent eight months surrounded by endings somewhere that's entirely about beginnings. Spring. New growth. Things coming back after a hard season." I shrugged into my jacket. "Also, yes, there will be flowers. Try not to laugh when I explain that part to him."
"I make no promises." But Gemma was smiling, the particular smile she gets when she thinks I'm about to do something both slightly unorthodox and completely correct. "The garden from Razor's place, right? Nadia and Sable and that whole crew keep the beds up."
"That's the one. I already cleared it with the co-op. They've got a section set aside for exactly this — Ranger mentioned when this town does anything, it does it as a group project, so apparently a therapy garden bed surprised nobody."
"Nothing surprises anybody in Clover Ridge. We peaked on surprise around the time Boone proposed to Harper in the middle of a bar fight."
"I heard that story. I don't fully believe it."
"Nobody fully believes it. It's still true." Gemma grabbed her own bag, heading for the door. "Good luck with the flowers, Doctor Green Thumb."
"It's Saoirse. We've discussed this."
"I know. I just like watching you sigh about it."
I found Elias waiting outside the clinic that afternoon, cane in hand, wearing the same careful expression he wore into every session, like he was bracing for something even when nothing had happened yet.
"We're not doing the mat room today," I told him.
"No?"
"No. We're doing the community garden. I've got you signed up for a raised bed, some seedlings, and approximately zero clinical equipment."
He blinked. "That's a change of pace."
"It is. Your leg's ahead of schedule. I want to work on something else for a while, and gardens happen to be extremely good at working on the something else.
" I started walking, slow enough for him to keep pace without it looking like an accommodation, which I've found matters more to men like Elias than they'll ever admit.
"Also, full disclosure, I've never actually grown anything successfully in my life, so you may end up teaching me. "
"You don't garden?"
"I killed a cactus once. In my defense, it was already sad when I got it."
That earned me the almost-laugh, quick and surprised, like it kept catching him off guard that I could make him do it.
The garden sat two blocks from the clinic, tucked behind the old grange hall, a patchwork of raised beds in various states of spring optimism — tomato starts staked and hopeful, a row of lettuce coming in ragged and green, a corner devoted entirely to sunflowers that hadn't decided yet whether they were going to be spectacular or a disappointment.
"This is Razor's place," I said, gesturing at the wider plot. "Well — not his exactly, but he's part of why it exists. Community project, few years back."
"I remember when they broke ground on it. I was still overseas." Something crossed his face, quick, gone before I could name it. "Feels strange, being back for the parts I missed the start of."
"That's most of coming home, probably. Walking into the middle of stories that started without you."
He looked at me sideways, like that landed somewhere he hadn't expected. "Yeah," he said. "That's exactly what it feels like."
I handed him a trowel and a tray of seedlings — tomatoes, mostly, a few peppers, hardy enough for a first-timer not to feel like a failure if something didn't take.
"Dig a hole about this deep," I said, demonstrating badly. "Set the root ball in. Don't be gentle about it, they're tougher than they look."
"You're describing my physical therapy philosophy back to me."
"I contain multitudes."
"You're going to want gloves next time," I said, wincing as he worked bare-handed through a particularly stubborn root ball. "I brought some. In my bag. Forgot to actually hand them over, apparently, because I am, it turns out, extremely bad at logistics for someone who runs a rehab wing."
"I don't mind the dirt."
"Nobody minds the dirt until they find out what's actually in dirt. There's a whole ecosystem down there. Fungi. Bacteria. Probably a civilization with its own government."
"You're overselling the danger of a flower bed."
"I contain multitudes, remember? Some of those multitudes are mildly alarmist about soil-borne pathogens.
" I tossed him the gloves anyway, and he caught them one-handed, quick reflexes still fully intact even with a cane propped against the raised bed beside him.
"Also, humor me. I like my patients with all ten fingers functional. "
"Copy that." He pulled the gloves on, examining them with faint suspicion, like they might betray him. "These are pink."
"They were on sale."
"Everything you own is apparently either on sale or from a gas station, based on what Gemma tells me."
"Gemma talks too much."
"Gemma's the reason half this town knows anything about anyone. I think it's technically her superpower." He said it with real affection, and I filed that away too — how easily he spoke about the people who loved him when the conversation wasn't asking him to examine his own wounds directly.
We worked in silence for a while after that, which surprised me — not an awkward silence, but an easy one, the kind that grows naturally between two people doing something with their hands that doesn't require constant narration.
He was better at it than I was, unsurprisingly; there was something in the careful, competent way he set each plant that told me exactly how good he must have been at his job before the blast took the choice away from him.
"You're a natural," I said.
"Grew up with a garden. My grandmother's. Every summer, corn and tomatoes and this one impossible squash plant that took over half the yard." A small, unguarded smile, the first fully unguarded thing I'd seen from him. "Haven't thought about that in years."
"Tell me about her."
"My grandmother?"
"Yeah. Not the blast. Not the leg. Her." I kept my eyes on my own crooked little hole in the dirt, giving him somewhere to look that wasn't directly at me, the same trick Knox probably used on him without either of us knowing we were both doing it.
"I want to hear about the parts of you that existed before all this.
There's more of you than the last eight months, Elias. I'd like to meet some of it."
He was quiet for a moment, trowel still in the dirt.
"She was tough," he said finally. "Raised five kids on a mail carrier's salary after my grandfather died young. Ran that garden like a small, terrifying military operation. If you didn't weed your row, you didn't eat dinner, and she meant it, God rest her, she absolutely meant it."
"Sounds like where you got the discipline."
"Probably. She used to say — " he paused, and something moved behind his eyes, memory surfacing gently instead of violently for once — "she used to say, 'Things that grow slow grow strong.
' Every summer, when the tomatoes were taking forever and I wanted to just yank them up and see if they were ready. Things that grow slow grow strong."
"I like that."
"She'd have liked you. She had zero patience for people who gave up on things because they were hard." He glanced at me, something warmer in it than I'd seen before. "You remind me of her a little. Which is either a compliment or extremely alarming, I haven't decided."
"I'll take it as a compliment. Mostly."
We kept working, and slowly, the way water finds its way downhill without ever seeming to try, he kept talking — not about the blast, not yet, but around it, in the careful orbit of a man circling something too hot to touch directly.
"Petrov used to talk about his girlfriend nonstop," he said, setting another seedling in the dirt.
"Had the ring in his kit. Wrapped in a sock, if you can believe that.
Showed it to me probably a dozen times. I could describe that ring to you right now, every detail, and I only saw it maybe thirty seconds total across eight months. "
"That's what happens to details that matter," I said. "They don't need long. They just need to matter."
He nodded slowly, working the dirt with more focus than the task strictly required.
"Rodriguez had a daughter. Two years old when I last saw a picture.
Called her his little warlord because she ran his whole house.
" A pause, longer this time. "Doc wanted to open a bait shop.
In Ohio. Had the whole business plan, if you can call three napkins and a lot of enthusiasm a business plan. "
"Tell me about Doc."
"Everyone called him Doc even though I was technically the medic.
He just had that energy. Unbothered. Nothing rattled him — not incoming, not bad news, not the time our CO chewed him out for something that wasn't even his fault.
He'd just nod, say 'copy that,' and go about his day like the world hadn't just tried to knock him down.
" Elias's jaw worked, and for a second I thought he might stop there, retreat back behind the wall like he always did when the ground got too soft under him.
He didn't.