CHAPTER SIXTY THREE

‎Chapter 63

‎What the Garden Knows

‎

‎Listen.

‎

‎The garden has been talking for a very long time.

‎

‎Not with words. Gardens don’t need words. They speak in the slow language of roots pushing through soil, of petals opening at dawn, of leaves falling when the season turns. They speak in scent and color and the way light settles on a particular stone at a particular hour.

‎

‎If you sit still long enough, you can hear it.

‎

‎The manor is quiet this morning.

‎

‎Not empty—never empty—but quiet in the way old places are quiet when they are full of life that has learned how to be gentle. The original stone walls are still there, half-hidden under climbing roses and ivy that has been trained and retrained by generations of hands. The great oak stands in the center of everything, its trunk so thick now that a dozen people can stand inside the hollow it has formed over centuries. Children do, sometimes, playing house or telling secrets where the wood smells of rain and time.

‎

‎The white fl