Then Marian.
Then Walter.
Nobody was being rescued.
That mattered.
These were adults crossing difficult spaces between one version of life and another.
The Garden House simply gave them somewhere solid to stand while they crossed.
My relationship with Claire and Daniel grew the same way.
Slowly.
Claire still annoyed me.
I annoyed her.
She made spreadsheets for everything.
I treated paperwork as a personal insult.
Daniel arrived almost every Saturday to repair things.
Usually things that were not broken.
One afternoon, he brought my old suitcase.
The same one he had dropped at my feet after Thomas’s funeral.
“I thought you might want this.”
I looked at it.
For months, I had treated that suitcase as a symbol of humiliation.
Now it was only a suitcase.
Brown.
Scuffed.
One wheel crooked.
“I don’t need it.”
Daniel’s face fell.
Then I added:
“But somebody might.”
We put it in the residents’ storage room.
