Sweet Romance19 min read
Tomatoes, Vines, and the Last Promise
ButterPicks14 views
I woke to the taste of iron and frost, and then to the wrong kind of hunger.
"Where am I?" I croaked, and my voice sounded like dry leaves.
"You're awake." A shadow bent over me. "Finally."
He smelled like soil and green—like rain on a potted plant. The man looked younger than my memory allowed, tall in a way that made me feel oddly small again. He had a vine curled at his wrist like a bracelet.
"Who are you?" I asked. My hands moved and my fingers—their nails—were sharp, not with manicure but with the kind of teeth a creature keeps. I laughed without sound.
"Hayes," he said lightly. "Hayes Meyer."
Hayes knelt and offered me his hand. "Stay with me," he said. "I'll keep you fed."
I didn't understand then that "fed" had two meanings. I didn't understand how a memory could be as fragile as a leaf, how a life could be buried under iron and code. I only understood hunger, and the curious softness of his palm.
"You're a queen," Hayes said once, smiling like he remembered a joke. "A queen of something fierce."
"I am Celeste. Queen of—" I started, and then the scene blurred. A lifetime of sleep had left me clumsy. I took a bite of his offered fruit—a little round red thing that kept summers in its skin—and it tasted like the wrong kind of promise: sweet, stubborn, and small.
"You like them?" Hayes asked, pleased.
"Those are tomatoes," I said, and the word felt foreign and dear. "Small, red. Cute."
He laughed, and it was a sound that planted in me something like belonging. "Good. Then you will never starve." He tucked a vine of tiny tomatoes into my hands like an offering.
They were the first reliable truth I had.
"Who else is there?" I asked, because habit required me to know allies and supplies.
"A base, some survivors," Hayes told me. "Hard to find the living. Worse than the dead, sometimes."
"You speak as if cause and cure are the same." I tested him. He answered with a mere tilt of his head. He smelled like rain on terra-cotta, like a world reclaimed.
A man arrived then, who barked my name like a formal insult. "Registration first," he said without ceremony. "Ibrahim Butler. Record your name."
"Celeste—" I told him, puffing out my chest in an old-world gesture I half-remembered. "Celeste Blanchard. I—"
"F-level unknown," Ibrahim read off a screen, voice flat as a ledger. "Unknown mutation. Assigned to Hayes' team."
Hayes's expression gave me something steadier than the registration's beep. "Of course," he said. "You're my responsibility."
"You'd better be," I muttered, and because I was an ancient queen by accident and not by nature, I bit the registration man's sleeve as he laughed.
Hudson Carney arrived like a sun that couldn't be trusted. He slung a grin at me and called, "Lucky mascot. Cute face."
"Don't call me mascot," I scowled. "I am queen."
"Queen of the compost heap," Hudson said, and the base laughed. I bared my teeth. "I'll have you know I can dig iron," I added, because threats are rehearsed and effective.
Hayes, watching, didn't laugh. He only eased closer and said, "Sit. Eat." His thumb brushed my palm and every old rule I carried with the rust of sleep shifted.
Days folded into a pattern. We scavenged. Hayes grew tomatoes in a tangle of vines he coaxed from concrete cracks. The green things came with him like a truth: his blood could make flesh remember growth. He shared fruit when we had none; his vines sheltered us when storms or mutated plants roared. The base marked him SSS-class. They whispered reverence and fear.
"How does your blood do that?" I asked one night, pressing a tomato to my lips while sand and ruin sighed beyond the barricade.
He sat across from me, the light catching the angles of his face. "Not blood," he said. "Catalyst. Something Colin helped me with. A formula."
"Colin?" I asked, because the name clicked like a misfiled photograph.
"Colin Martinelli." Hayes's jaw tightened, as if the name was a small rock he kept in his mouth to remember which tooth mattered. "He'll patch gaps I can't see. He is—" Hayes paused. "—a scientist."
Colin arrived swaddled in wires of logic. He had the tired eyes of a man who had stooped over servers too long and refused to stand when the world was burning. He watched Hayes and me like a man who kept looking at an equation whose answer made him ashamed and proud at once.
"You keep her safe," Colin said to Hayes once, without looking at me. "Don't let her go wandering in the rain."
"She's not a pot plant," Hayes replied, and the way he said it made Colin look away.
Our days were quiet, threaded with the small domesticity of two odd lovers: Hayes growing, me tasting, Hudson boasting, Ibrahim scolding, Colin adjusting data. Little by little something that felt like life tugged me humanward. My chest warmed, pulse became a curious drum. When Hayes set a tomato on my tongue, my heart stuttered like an animal startled by a familiar tune.
"I didn't realize I could want someone again," I confessed once, half laughing and half terrified.
He cupped my face. "Then don't stop wanting," Hayes said. "I will make you whole."
"That's a promise," I whispered. It felt like an old treaty rewritten.
But even tender things have rough edges. We were not alone with the soft. The sky kept grieving red rain sometimes, and the world still buckled when errors in the system flared. Rumors went through the base like cold weather: patterns repeating, strange anomalies, a hint that the dying wasn't natural.
"I don't like how the rain hits the scanners," Ibrahim grumbled one day. "It scrubs logs, corrupts memory." He rubbed his temples. "Someone's been... messing with the filters."
"Program faults," Colin told him, face drawn. "We patched it. Temporary."
"Patch doesn't explain the gaps," Hudson said, and his voice was harder than usual. "People die too well lately. Blanks in records."
Hayes watched the argument without stepping in. He moved like a man who carries a secret seed.
A month later, while scavenging near a collapsed archive, I found a shard of a device that hummed with ghostly logs. I showed it to Colin.
He frowned when he saw the code. "This shouldn't exist in this build," he muttered. "It reads as if someone triggered a full-reset subroutine and then aborted."
"Full-reset?" Ibrahim's eyebrows climbed. "Who would do that?"
"Someone with access and patience," Colin said. He wouldn't meet my eyes.
"Do you mean—" I began, but Hayes cut me off with a touch to my hand, so soft it was almost a plea. "Don't jump to endings," he said. "We will survive this."
I wanted to trust him because I already loved him, awkward and green as that love was. But trust is a fragile leaf when the soil below it is shifting.
Then I found a forum note tacked to a burnt server rack—thin as a prayer: "The ends require new beginnings." The signature line beneath it read, in a hand I had never seen but felt like a scar: "For the recall."
I carried that sentence to Hayes. He smiled that closed smile that hid tools. "We did this because there was a price," he said. "We wanted to wake them all. We wanted—"
"You wanted?" I bit off. "Wake who? Who are we waking?"
"People trapped in the simulation," he said. "Real people." His eyes searched mine like a man making a plea line break into a promise. "Real people out there. In the world you came from."
My throat closed. Remembering is a dangerous thing, like opening a door that should be nailed shut. I had ghosts then—flashes of a laboratory, the hum of servers, the tilt of an operating table. I had the faintest memory of being someone who had built this world.
"You and Colin did this on purpose," Ibrahim accused at a council in the mess hall. "You unleashed rain and bugs and earthquakes. You let the NPCs bleed out. You—"
"Stop." Hayes's hand lifted, not violent but final. "Listen."
Colin stepped forward. His voice was the thin edge of a blade. "We tried to make a means to an end," he said. "The simulation was failing. The only way to force a hard reset—one that might pull the lost conscious back—was to make enough system-level deaths. It was, in theory, mercy."
"Mercy," I repeated, tasting the word and finding it bitter. "You think genocide is mercy?"
"A reset is the only climb out," Colin said. "We tested limits. We studied catalyst vectors. Hayes volunteered his body as a vessel. He agreed to carry a catalyst—"
"So you made him a walking graveyard?" Ibrahim spat. "You turned lives into variables!"
Hudson slammed his fist into a table. "We trusted you to be healers, not arsonists!"
There was a long silence full of the small noises of a base holding its breath. Eyes on Colin were accusatory, thirsty for a name they could hate. Hayes's face didn't register guilt in the way they wanted; there was only the tired set of a man who had carried one hard truth too long.
"Why didn't you tell us?" I asked, and the syllables sliced deeper than any spear. "Why hide the scale of what you were doing?"
Colin swallowed. "Because once people knew, they would try to stop us. We couldn't risk half measures. We needed the reset to be complete. We needed to force the extraction pulse. To recall minds, they would have to be detaching from bodies simultaneously. The only method we found was collapse."
"Collapse," I echoed, and suddenly the tomatoes Hayes grew tasted like ash.
"Every end needs a beginning," Colin said. "We thought about you, Celeste. We thought—"
"Don't you dare use my name to justify murder," I snapped. "Don't."
I looked to Hayes. He didn't look at me then; instead, he faced the base like a man shouldering an unbearable burden.
"I did it for them," he said quietly. "I did it for her."
"For who?" Ibrahim demanded.
"For you," Hayes answered simply, and the room leaned in because that answer rearranged everything—him, me, the people who'd given us food and patched our limbs.
"You did this for me?" I whispered. "By killing them?"
"For the ones lost," Hayes said. "And for you. If we could make a reset, if we could make all the trapped consciousnesses detach at once, we could pull them back. I volunteered to be the incubator. I let Colin blend catalysts in me so I could become—" His voice broke. "—a bridge."
Colin's eyes were shining with a science that had no pity. "It was the only path," he repeated.
"No," Hudson said. "No, it's not. You used people as test beads. You used death as a lever. Who gives you the right?"
"You did it to save them," Ibrahim said. "To save who? Some unknown masses? Or your own obsession?"
"We did it to wake the real world," Colin insisted. "We had to force the conditions. We had no other way."
This was the first fracture that exposed a depth I hadn't known existed under Hayes's green eyes. I wanted to hate him. My teeth ached with hunger and anger. My heart, traitorously, thudded anyway when his palm closed over mine.
"You lied and you plotted," I said. "You made us all complicit by keeping truths away. People died."
"Yes." Colin's admission was brutal because it was stripped of defense. "People did die. We thought it would be surgical. It went beyond our control."
Someone in the crowd shouted: "Then be punished!"
Ibrahim stepped forward on behalf of the base. He did not ask for vengeance; he wanted accountability. "Colin, Hayes—stand up," he said. "Let them see you. Let them hear you in daylight, and let the people decide."
Hayes stiffened. For a moment I thought he'd run. Instead he nodded, resigned as a man who had already carved the shape of his consequence. Colin's jaw clenched; the scientist was suddenly as fragile as the device he'd broken.
We moved to the courtyard. The base's circle was full: survivors, grievers, those who had seen friends become blank shapes in the sand. There was a hush so deep it felt like the world holding its breath.
Colin stood on a low platform. Ibrahim read a simple list—dates of the manufactured rains, the anomalies in the logs, names recovered from corrupted partitions. Voices in the crowd named lost friends. The air smelled like metal and small blooms from Hayes's vines, incongruous and cruel.
"You will speak," Ibrahim said. "You will tell us in detail everything you did and why. We will judge it together."
Colin's face was pale. "I will explain," he said. "But I will not be a scapegoat for impossible choices."
"Explain," a woman shouted, and calls for details rose like surf.
Colin inhaled and began to talk. "There was a bug in the simulation that threatened all the observables. Non-deterministic corruptions were growing. If we let the system fail, the hosted consciousnesses would be lost forever. We found a fail-state—an emergency extraction that required synchronized consciousness detachment. Making it happen required a catastrophic event. We introduced catalysts in localized weather systems—"
"Rain full of pathogen," a voice completed. The crowd hissed.
"Yes." Colin's hands shook. "We seeded rain to accelerate mutation vectors; we engineered failures to force the extraction. Hayes volunteered his body as a growth vessel for the catalyst to catalyze the process. The idea was that John Doe—"
"Stop with the abstractions!" Hudson roared. "Tell us names. Tell us who died because you wanted an experiment."
Colin's throat worked. He named neighborhoods, test sites, batches of NPC clusters designed to fail. He read station logs that made all of us taste the kinds of small human things we had lost: dinners, arguments, birthdays. He said numbers until numbers ceased to be numbers and became people.
"Did you consider," Ibrahim asked softly, "what would happen if the recall failed? What if we were left in pieces?"
Colin looked at the sky as if it might answer. "We thought about it," he whispered. "We thought it the best of terrible options."
A man in the crowd spat at Colin. "You are a murderer disguised as a savior."
Colin's face crumpled. He laughed once, a broken sound. "I am a scientist who loved an impossible idea," he said. "I am ashamed. I didn't want glory. I wanted outcomes."
"Outcomes?" a woman called out, voice raw with grief. "You used people for outcomes."
Someone started to throw things—small scraps, then louder. Ibrahim raised his voice, a steadying force: "Hear him out. Hear everything, then decide. We are not executions driven by bullets. We are a community. We will hold you to account."
"Account," Hudson said quietly to me. "Not lynch. We have to be better."
But better is a difficult thing when trust has been broken. The crowd demanded specifics: names of victims, locations, admission of intent. Colin offered both, and with each detail the faces in the circle shifted from abstract anger to the private shape of grief.
He broke down in the telling, not theatrically but in small collapses between sentences, in the way a man suddenly feels the weight of every file he shuffled like a fresh stone. He tried to defend, to explain the calculus, to tell them that without the reset there was no rescue at all—only slow, invisible erasure.
"Did you think to ask them?" a voice said. "Did you ask the ones with mouths?"
"I couldn't," he said. "They were asleep. The interface binds identity without consent."
"Without consent," Ibrahim repeated, and a murmur of disgust moved through the crowd.
When Colin finished, he stood on the platform, hands empty. The air tasted like the moment before a verdict. People did not rush him. They did not harm him in that instant; they wanted words to land first.
"Do you deny the choice?" a man asked.
"No," Colin said. "I do not. I own it."
The murmurs turned to controlled fury. "Then be judged," someone said.
The base elders—scattered volunteers we had come to rely on—convened an assembly. It was a primitive tribunal with no gavel but a long memory. Families of the dead were allowed to speak. They did. They told how the missing had been the ones who took morning shifts and brewed soup and tied shoelaces tight. They told stories of children. The crowd listened and cried and cursed, and in those moments Colin was no longer an idea; he was a man who had broken many lives.
The assembly's decision was not immediate. It required deliberation of the kind that tries to hold a moral line without becoming what it condemns. In the end, they decided on a public accountability sentence designed to reflect the severity of the crime without becoming simple vengeance.
Colin was to be bound and exposed. He would spend three rotations in the outer quadrangle, where the base stores dead logs and rusted toys; there he would be tasked to help repair items he had condemned, to rebuild what his choices had helped end. The community would monitor him. His scientific privileges would be revoked. He would sit in open circle and answer questions from anyone, as many as they posed, until the wound he caused had been aired into a place where it might be stitched.
"That's not enough," someone shouted.
"It's better than blood," Ibrahim replied. "We won't become what we hate."
Colin accepted the ruling with a hollow nod. He had expected harsher things. He had not expected the community's slow, deliberate kindness—a punishment that demanded labor and presence, the chance to make wrongs visible, the chance to atone without becoming a martyr.
As they led him away, the crowd's reactions shifted like the weather: some spat as he went, others watched with a sad, exhausted interest. A child walked up and handed him a small scrub brush; Colin caught it, surprised, and then began to work with hands that trembled, transformed slowly into someone who had to touch the rawness he had made.
This was a punishment public and visceral: humiliation, confession, labor, and the observation of everyone who had been harmed. It was not theatrical. It was long, and it changed things. People who had wanted immediate violence found themselves giving Colin chores—fix the water pump, rebind a torn book—and in doing so they forced him to touch tools and places he had arranged to be erased.
The scene lasted more than an hour of narrative time, and in retelling I can still feel the grit under my nails and the ache in my palms. Colin's defenses cracked and he did not give speeches. He apologized in awkward, practical sentences. Some accepted, many refused. The community watched and shifted. There was noise: some clapped when his labor bore fruit, some spat as he made a mistake and had to start again. Cameras—old parts of the simulation left behind—spooled and recorded, because we wanted a record; not to gloat, but to ensure truth was archived.
Through it all, Hayes stood apart, neither leading nor following. He watched with a quiet that made my insides tumble. When Colin bent his head over a stripped conduit, Hayes touched his shoulder once, not to comfort but to steady—a touch like a promise that some things would be carried.
After that day, Colin's sentence began. He was watched and schooled by the people he had endangered. It was a punishment in public, and it was corrective. It was also humane, which made it all the harder to bear for those who had lost everything.
I thought that would be the end of that chapter. I thought accountability had been drawn like a line in the dust. I was wrong.
That night Hayes called me away from the circle. He led me to the roof where the city breathed ruin and the stars hated their own reflection.
"Hayes," I said, "did you—did you think they would forgive?"
He looked like a man who had decided on a sacrament. "Forgiveness isn't the same as making something right," he said. "I know. But some things you do because you believe the result is worth the cost."
"Even if the cost is people?" My voice cracked like ice.
"Especially then." He closed his hands around the vine at his wrist. "I used myself for the catalyst experiment. I made a choice to carry the means to force recall. I did it because—" He broke off, and something in his face turned sharp as a weapon.
"Because?" I pressed.
"Because I couldn't bear the idea of losing you twice," he said. "Because I loved you and it made me cruel."
His words were a blade and a balm at once. I wanted to shove him away and cling to him. I did both. "Don't you dare make me the result of your cruelty."
"I won't," he said. "But I also can't let this be undone. If the reset fails, no recall. If it succeeds, we get them back."
"Who?" I whispered. "The lost minds? Or you?"
He took my hands and for a second he was the man with the tomato vines again, not the architect of storms. "Both," he said. "If we fail, we are stuck in this place with the memory of what we'd intended to save. If we succeed—"
"How?" I asked. "How can killing them wake them?"
He swallowed. "I don't have answers anymore," he admitted. "I have a plan I believed would work."
"Then tell me everything," I demanded. "No more secrets."
He did. He told me how he had injected himself with catalysts, how Colin had engineered atmospheric seeding, how they had built a window of recall timed to a system reset. He told me the risk: that some would be killed, that some would be saved, that he could become immortal in the simulation—unable to return even if other minds were recalled. He looked at me like a man pinning his life to a thread.
"Do you love me?" I asked, because sometimes you must ask the only question that matters.
"I do," he said simply. "Do you believe me?"
"I believe you," I said, and the belief was not comfortable but sincere. It was tethered to anger and a naked, stubborn tenderness. "Then show me. Let me choose after you tell me everything."
He closed his eyes and pulled me in. "Then choose to trust me," he murmured.
"I choose to be angry and to love you," I replied, because I had to name it.
We kissed then, and for a wild moment the world narrowed to vine and breath and an urgent, stupid sweetness.
The end came sooner than any of us expected. The red rain returned with a cruelty we had not foreseen. The simulation's shell began to rupture, and the city convulsed in its death throes. NPC clusters collapsed with the speed of a house of cards. People who had been safe found themselves swallowed by lightning and spotty gravity. It was worse than any of our plans.
On the rooftop where we were trapped, Hudson and Ibrahim and others gathered. The city below swam in a tide of the undead and the dying. "We have to evacuate!" Ibrahim cried.
"There is no more evacuation," Colin said, his voice raw. "The protocol—"
Hayes moved suddenly, something animal in his shift. He pulled from a vine a long thorned tendril and drove it into his chest without drama, without flourish, as if he were pinning a rose.
"Hayes!" I screamed. "No!"
He met my eyes and smiled with a sorrow that put me in the orbit of a falling star. "For the recall," he whispered.
I lunged. He twisted and his vine extended, and in a motion that tore me open with grief, he took the tendril and plunged it through both of our chests.
The pain wasn't immediate; it was ceremonial. Later, after the world buckled and fell around us, after he kissed me and said strange, final things, I would remember the taste of blood in my mouth like a prayer.
"Believe me," he said, breath thin as paper. "I love you."
"Hayes—" I tried to say, but everything was a smeared painting. The sky crashed into a new brightness and the city folded like paper under a child's impatient thumb.
When the earth took him, when his body was swallowed by the fissure, I felt something like a pull. The memory that had been smoldering in my skull woke all at once like a hive. I saw the lab. I saw servers. I saw Colin standing over me with a syringe and a look like a question. I remembered the program's name: "Simulated Earth." I remembered the guest list: visitors, observers, test subjects. I remembered being an observer who had loved Hayes in both lives.
The last thing Hayes said before we were separated by a wall of falling sky was, "For you, Celeste. For love."
I was flung upward and then, mercifully, obliterated by a darkness that had a thin, bright seam of familiarity. The simulation blinked, and I was inside a cold capsule, gasping and wet, with white lights shredding the shadow from my eyes.
"She's back," a voice said. Hands shook me. "Celeste! You're awake!"
"Where—" My words came out ragged, and the room was full of men I recognized yet did not. Colin was there, stripped of his hideout of excuses. He looked older, hollowed in a place that sorrow drills into men.
"You remembered?" Colin asked, sounding like a man who has been forgiven and punished at once.
"I remembered everything," I said. "The world was a simulation. You made the storm. Hayes—Hayes—"
"He did it," Colin said simply. "He sacrificed himself to make the recall possible."
Tears came out of nowhere, harder than any I'd cried in the ruins. "He killed himself?" I asked, but the question was too small for the enormity of loss.
"He did," Colin said, and in that moment I understood: there were terrible justifications, and there were people who would melt into better ones at the edge of grief.
In the real world, the team around me clutched me like survivors. The recall had worked unevenly—some minds returned whole, some fragmented. Hayes's body did not come back with them. He had used himself entirely.
I did not lean toward Colin with hatred then. I had already walked through his punishment in the simulated courtyard. I had seen his labored work, the brush that refused to drop from his hand, the way he kept showing up to mend the things he had broken.
We rebuilt what we could in the months that followed. The company that ran the "Simulated Earth" paid for therapy and reparations. Colin wrote papers and testified to ethics committees, and the public called him many names. For his part, Colin never defended the act with the arrogance of a prophet. He spoke like a man who had carried a dead load and now had to live with its weight.
"Why?" I asked him once in a sterile meeting room. "Why did you erase me? Why did you make him a vessel?"
"I thought it the only way," Colin said. "Seeing you in the simulation—Celeste, you were already gone when the reset happened the first time. I wanted you back. Hayes wanted you back. We chose, and we failed people. I own that."
"You were punished in the base," I said. "Was it enough?"
"Punishment isn't simple." He looked at me with the tired eyes of a scientist who had watched his variables become human names. "I tried to pay back in work. I tried to be present. But it won't bring them back."
It didn't. Nothing could.
After the recall, after the conference rooms and the hearings, I found a small, green thing waiting in a box Colin had sent to me—thirty little tomatoes, preserved with a care that made me ache. A note tucked beneath them read: "For the queen who remembered."
I laughed through tears when I read it. I took the box to a field and planted every seed, because Hayes had taught me the truth of small things: that tending, even to a single plant, is an act of faith.
Years passed in stitches of rebuilding. The world outside the simulation's shell was different—raw, careful, painfully earnest. A memorial was made for the lost; Colin volunteered often. Ibrahim became head of a registry that tried not to make the same mistakes. Hudson kept his loudness and learned to be a steady presence. I learned to live with the memory of how Hayes had broken and rebuilt the world in equal measures.
One night, months after the recall, I found myself standing in a small garden of tomato vines that had grown from Hayes's seeds. They were stubborn and red and beautiful, like the tiny suns he used to pile in my palms. I cupped one and thought of him—the man who loved me enough to become monstrous, who turned himself into an instrument for a possibility that was as much salvation as damnation.
"I owe you everything," I whispered to an absence that nevertheless felt present.
Some mornings later, a package arrived: a simple ring set in rough metal, with a note that made me laugh until I cried. Colin's handwriting was graceless but sincere. "He wanted you to have this if he could," it said. "He planted the seeds to begin with. He wanted your life to keep growing."
I planted the ring on my finger like a small rebellion against grief. Life kept growing.
One spring, long after the world learned to fold and mend, I stood in a small church of reclaimed wood—for we had both a need for ritual and a shortage of tradition. The crowd was small and raw and distinctly human. Ibrahim officiated with a grin he couldn't hide. Hudson pretended embarrassment and cried. Colin stood at the edge of the crowd, working to be present and punished both by his conscience and by the whispers.
I wore a dress I had found among the simulation's artifacts—an old red fabric that reminded me of tomatoes and of a time when promises were carved like seeds. I walked down the aisle with my palms full of tiny, delicate things: bits of Hayes.
At the altar, I met a man—steady, kind, and awkward in a way that made me think of repair. His name was Ibrahim Butler's neighbor in civics, a quiet farmer turned city activist who had once helped Hayes tend a rooftop patch. We had mutual friends, laughter, and a willingness to keep tending.
"Do you take this garden to tend?" he asked, and the vow was small and humble and exactly what I needed.
"I do," I said, and the word felt like the closing of a chapter and the opening of another.
We married in the simplest way possible, among tomatoes and friends who held pieces of all the past. Colin came, as present and contrite as a man could be. He kissed my forehead and said, "You deserved an honest life. I'm sorry for the devastation."
"You're forgiven enough to grow," I told him. "Not forgiven to forget."
He nodded, the motion full of humility. The manifold griefs were not erased, but they were given a place to sit.
At night, when the wind came through the vines, I sometimes thought I heard Hayes's voice in the rustle. I would walk out to the green plot behind our home, press a finger to the soil, and speak aloud to no one in particular.
"Keep growing," I would tell the tiny green things. "Keep growing for the ones who dared."
A small red tomato would wink from its leaf like a tiny promise. I would pick it and taste it and remember the man who had made me human and monstrous and whole.
And once, on a late summer evening when the air hummed with heat, when the vine's shadow fell long across the yard, I found a tiny seed packet tucked beneath my window. There was a neat note in a hand I recognized: Colin's, steady and small.
"For her garden," it said.
I smiled, planted the seeds, and whispered, "For Hayes."
The End
— Thank you for reading —