Chapter Two

Small Private Arrangements

It was a soft July evening, near six, and Pavel was in the garden in the old t-shirt he kept for exactly this, tending the geraniums — five colors, his own arrangement: red, orange, white, the palest pink, and one so dark it was almost black. He had planted them in that order years ago. No one had ever noticed. He had long since stopped expecting anyone to.

The linden along the street was doing what it did every evening at this hour — letting down a sweetness gentle enough to feel like a hand resting on the back of your neck. A scent that approached slowly, as though unsure whether it was allowed.

He had been away two days — Plovdiv, meetings, a hotel room, dinner alone with his phone face-down on the table. Before he left he had asked his mother to water the plants. She had nodded the way she nodded at practical things, already drifting somewhere else.

He crouched at the first pot and pressed two fingers into the soil. Wet. Past wet — soaked through, the kind that takes days to drain.

His first thought was: she did it on purpose.

He knew the thought was unworthy even as it arrived. It always was. And the knowing never stopped it — only shamed him half a second later, which was its own familiar arrangement. She had not done it on purpose. She had watered once, then doubted herself, then watered again, and again — checking and rechecking the way she did with everything, adding more because she could not bear the chance of having given too little. That was her whole life in a flowerpot. She never learned the difference between love and love to the point of erasure.