"The southern border," he said, "is the part I want to start with. In the spring."
"Is it very overgrown?"
"Comprehensively. There is a wall underneath all of it that I did not even know existed until Mr. Dobson cleared some of the ivy last autumn." He looked out toward it, just a dark shape at that hour, the boundary between garden and field. "I would like to put roses along it. The climbing variety, possibly, though Mr. Dobson thinks that's too ambitious for the first year."
"What do you think?"
"I think ambition is precisely the point of a first year." He glanced at her. "What would you choose?"
She considered it. He watched her consider it and felt something lift, briefly, in his chest, the small hope of a question landing somewhere real.
"I am sure whatever you choose will be beautiful," she said. "You have such a clear sense of it already. I could not imagine improving on it."
He felt his face pale as she said that. He had watched her consider it, and yet she had not given him a thought or an opinion on the matter.
Thomas stopped walking.
Genevieve stopped a half-step later and turned to look at him with an expression of polite inquiry, pleasant and patient, and he looked at it, at the careful, finished surface of it. It affected him deeply. He felt his mouth open before he had given it permission to, and before he could properly order his words, he found himself speaking.
"I do not want to talk about the garden," he said.
A pause.
"All right."
"I want to talk about—" He stopped. The things he wanted to talk about arranged themselves in his mind and he sorted through them and discarded most of them, because most of them were the wrong shape for that moment, too large or too direct or requiring a vulnerability from her that she had made very clear, without ever saying so, that she was not currently prepared to offer. "I want to know how you are," he said. "Actually."
"I am quite well," she said. "Thank you."
"Genevieve."
She met his eyes. Hers were very steady. Steadier than anything ought to be, he thought, that was actually fine.
"It's a lovely evening," she said, gently. "I am glad we came out."
He looked at her for a moment longer. She looked back at him with that expression, warm, unreadable, perfectly composed, and he understood that she was not going to give him anything that evening.
"Yes," he said. "So am I."
They walked on. He did not try again with the garden. He did not try again with anything, because there was nothing left that was safe to try, and the unsafe things required a conversation that neither of them was ready for and he would not force on her out there in the mild dark, however much he wanted to.
After a while she said she was rather tired.
"Of course," he said.
"It's been a long week."
"It has."
She unthreaded her arm from his with a care that was somehow worse than abruptness would have been, and said good night, and crossed the garden toward the house. He watched her go, the shape of her against the lit windows, and then through the door, and then gone.
The garden settled around him.
He stood in it for a long time, long after the light in her window had gone dark, long after there was any reasonable purpose in standing there. The night was mild and the stars were out and his garden was full of plans he had been looking forward to and he felt, standing alone in the middle of it, like a man in an empty house.
He had not the first idea what to do next.
He knew, with a certainty that had arrived somewhere during the walk without announcing itself, that doing nothing was finished. That particular option had closed, quietly, somewhere between the fountain and her good night, and he had felt it close and had not stopped it, because he was not sure he wanted to.