"Supervised." The word carried weight, the specific weight of someone choosing the accurate term over the charitable one. "He directed. Other people dug."
I heard what was underneath that. "Was that how he did most things?"
A pause. He turned his coffee cup once in his hand, the same deliberate gesture I'd seen him make with the water glass at dinner.
"Yes," he said.
Just that. No elaboration, no context, no softening of the admission. His grandfather had been the kind of man who directed while other people did the work, and Dominic was not going to pretend otherwise.
"But he wanted the trees," I said.
"He wanted the trees." He looked at the nearest magnolia, large, old, the bark gray and furrowed in the way of something that had been there long enough to develop character. "I asked him once why he spent so much time on the garden when he never spent time in it. He had people to tend it, people to maintain it. He came out here perhaps once a month." A breath. "He said it wasn't about the time in it. It was about knowing it was there."
The sky had shifted again. The blue-gray was becoming something lighter, with the faintest suggestion of warmth at the horizon.
"What was he like," I said.
Dominic was quiet for a moment.
"Effective," he said finally. "Certain of his own judgment. Convinced that the most important thing he could do was ensure that everything he built would outlast him." He looked at the bench, at the stone of it, the weathering of it, the particular patina of something that had been rained on and dried out andrained on again for many years. "He built things that outlasted him. He was right about that." A pause. "He was wrong about some other things."
He didn't specify. I didn't ask.
I looked at the magnolias instead, at the garden that a man had directed into existence and then visited once a month to confirm its continued presence, and I thought about what it meant to build something primarily to prove you could, to make something last when you yourself would not. Whether that was legacy or just a very expensive way of refusing to accept impermanence.
My grandfather had been different. He'd built small, careful things, a relationship with his granddaughter, a collection of books with specific dedications, a flash drive pressed into a palm with specific instructions. Things that required a recipient. Things that were only legible to someone who knew where to look.
I had not opened the flash drive yet.
I was aware of this in the way you were aware of something you were avoiding, not consciously, not with the full weight of attention, but with the peripheral awareness of something present in your field that you kept choosing not to look at directly.
"The only good thing he did," Dominic said quietly, "was the garden."
I turned.
He was looking at the trees, not at me, and he'd said it the way you said things you'd thought for a long time and had stopped feeling the need to qualify, not bitterly, not sadly, just with the flatness of a conclusion reached and set down. He was not performing complexity for my benefit. He was simply telling me something true, the way he'd agreed to.
I looked at the magnolias. At the garden that was the only good thing a man had done.
The trees were beautiful. They had nothing to do with whether the man who planted them deserved to be remembered well. They were simply there, large and old and continuing to bloom, indifferent to the biography of their origin.
I thought about the version of Dominic Moreau I'd arrived here with, the idea of him I'd constructed from the chair in my father's living room, from the clean suit and the low voice and the fact of the choice he'd made. I had built him into something comprehensible. A type. A category of person whose behavior followed a legible pattern and whose motivations, however unwelcome, were at least manageable once you'd understood them.
I could not fit this version, the man in shirtsleeves on a garden bench before dawn, saying the only good thing he did was the garden, into that category.
This required a new one. I didn't have one ready.
The sky turned. The first real light came, the sun not yet visible but present in the quality of the air, the way the colors of the garden began to be legible, the deep green of the leaves, the white of the blooms on the nearest tree, the gray of the stone, the brown of the earth.
"I should go back in," I said.
He looked over. "You should sleep."
"Maybe."
I stood. He didn't. He was going to stay here, I understood, going to sit with the garden in the growing light the way he probably did on other mornings, or at least the mornings when the thing keeping him awake made the house feel too small to contain it.
"Dominic," I said.