Chapter Forty Nine

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Jules' POV

The garden had been Madeline's idea originally — a small plot behind the kitchen, nothing ambitious, just a few raised beds where Eli could plant things and watch them grow, the kind of project meant to give a restless four-year-old something productive to focus his enormous energy on during the long stretch of spring afternoons. It had become, over the months, something larger than any of us had intended.

I found myself out there most mornings now, kneeling in dirt that had become genuinely familiar to my hands in a way that surprised me — the particular satisfaction of working soil, of watching something respond to careful attention, that I hadn't experienced since Nana's garden, since the farm, since a version of my life I had believed was permanently behind me.

Eli's section was chaos, by design. He had insisted on planting things in patterns that made sense only to him — a row of carrots interrupted by a single sunflower seed he'd insisted needed to be "in charge" of the carrots, a section devoted entirely to things he wanted to eat raw, directly off the plant, with no intention of waiting for them to be cooked. Adam had built him a small wooden sign, hand-lettered, that read ELI'S FARM, which Eli had insisted be staked at the entrance with the gravity of a landowner establishing boundaries.

I was out there on a Saturday morning in May, weeks before the wedding, kneeling in my own section with my hands in the dirt, when Eli wandered over with a small paper packet of seeds he'd been hoarding.

"What are these?" I asked.

He looked at the packet with the serious consideration he gave most things. "Wildflowers," he said. "Like in the picture."

"What picture?"

"The one Dad showed me. From the jeweler guy." He held the packet out to me. "I asked Dad what flowers were in your ring and he showed me a picture and I asked if we could plant some and he said yes but he wanted it to be a surprise so don't tell him I told you."

I sat back on my heels in the dirt and looked at my son, who had apparently been coordinating a secret garden project with his father for weeks without my having any idea, and something in my chest did the thing it had been doing more and more often lately — that specific, full, almost painful expansion that came from being loved this completely, this thoroughly, by people who had decided, independently and without prompting, to keep finding new ways to show it.

"I won't tell," I said. "Show me where you want to plant them."

We spent the next hour working together, Eli directing the placement with the confidence of someone who had clearly given this considerable thought, me following his instructions because they didn't actually matter, the wildflowers would grow wherever they were planted, what mattered was the doing of it together, his small dirty hands pressing seeds into soil with a tenderness that always surprised me in a child capable of such enormous, chaotic energy in every other context.

"Will they be ready for the wedding?" he asked.

"Probably not," I said honestly. "Wildflowers take a while. But they'll be ready for next spring. And the spring after that. They'll keep coming back, every year, as long as we let them."

Eli considered this. "Like a tradition," he said.

I looked at him, surprised by the word, by the precision of it coming from a four-year-old who had heard it somewhere — probably from Madeline, who used the word liberally about everything from Sunday pancakes to bedtime stories — and applied it correctly to something he'd just helped create.

"Exactly like a tradition," I said.

* * *

Adam found us there an hour later, both of us filthy, Eli's secret thoroughly unkept because he had apparently also told Madeline, who had told Adam, in the casual, leaky way that four-year-old secrets traveled through a household that loved each other too much to keep anything truly hidden for long.

"I heard there's a wildflower conspiracy happening in my garden," Adam said, settling onto the grass beside us, careful of his clothes in a way that had become increasingly rare over the months, the careful corporate man giving way more and more to someone willing to sit in the dirt with his family.

"Eli told me everything," I said. "He's a terrible secret keeper."

"I am an excellent secret keeper," Eli said, deeply offended. "I only told Madeline."

"And she told me," Adam said. "Which means the secret made it exactly one extra person before collapsing entirely."

"That's still pretty good," Eli said, undeterred.

Adam laughed and pulled Eli into his lap, dirt and all, and looked at me over the top of our son's head with an expression that had become so familiar now, so woven into the daily texture of our life, that I sometimes forgot to notice how extraordinary it still was — this man, who had once told me he never loved me, looking at me now like I was the entire reason the world made sense.

"The ring inspired this?" I asked.

"Eli asked what flowers were in it," Adam said. "I told him the story — the field, the rain, the night before everything fell apart and then eventually came back together. He decided we should grow our own version of it. I thought it was a good idea."

I looked at the small, freshly planted row of seeds, indistinguishable yet from ordinary dirt, holding inside them the eventual promise of wildflowers that would bloom long after this particular spring had passed, returning every year, the way the things that mattered most always seemed to find a way to keep coming back.

"It's a perfect idea," I said.

We sat together in the garden until the light started to go gold with evening, Eli eventually wandering off to find Victor, Adam's arm finding its way around my shoulders the way it always did now, easy and certain, and I thought about Nana's garden, about the farm, about everything I had once believed was permanently lost.

Some things, it turned out, only needed the right season to come back.

* * *

That evening, after Eli was asleep and the dirt had been washed from under all our fingernails, Adam pulled out his phone and showed me something he'd apparently been keeping for the right moment — photographs, dozens of them, documenting the secret weeks of planning he and Eli had done together. Eli at the garden center, deeply serious, comparing seed packets. Eli and Adam on the kitchen floor with a laptop, researching wildflower varieties. A grainy video, clearly taken from Adam's phone propped against something in the garden shed, of Eli explaining to an invisible audience exactly why "the purple ones are the most important" with the gravity of someone delivering a keynote address.

I scrolled through them with my chest aching in the good way, the way it had been aching more and more often lately.

"You did all this without me knowing," I said. "Weeks of it."

"Eli's idea, mostly," Adam said. "I just helped him execute it. He's surprisingly organized for someone who refuses to wear matching socks."

"He gets that from Nana," I said. "She used to say organization was for people who didn't trust their instincts. She trusted her instincts completely and her kitchen still somehow worked."

"Sounds like a woman I would have liked," Adam said, echoing, without knowing it, almost exactly what he'd said the first time I'd told him about her.

"She would have liked you too," I said. "Eventually. After a probationary period."

"How long a probationary period?"

"Knowing her? Several years. Possibly a decade."

Adam laughed, pulling me closer on the porch swing, the lake gone dark and quiet beyond the garden, the first faint green shoots of the wildflower bed barely visible in the fading light, holding inside them the promise of something that would keep returning, year after year, long after the dirt under our fingernails had washed away and the day itself had become just another good memory in the growing collection of them.

"Thank you," I said quietly, "for teaching our son that love is something you grow on purpose. Not just something that happens to you."

Adam pressed a kiss to my temple. "He taught me that," he said. "I'm just trying to keep up."