Chapter One: The Window

Six weeks.

Derek had been watching his neighbor garden for six weeks, and the fact that he could state this with precision, forty-two days since the Thursday after he'd finished unpacking the studio monitors, told him something about himself he wasn't ready to examine.

Every morning, same sequence. Coffee at the kitchen counter. First cup before the monitors were even warmed up, second cup standing at the window over the sink. Her, in the garden next door. Kneeling on a faded green mat with pruning shears that caught the light when she turned them. Blonde hair pulled back, work gloves that went past her wrists, movements so deliberate they looked choreographed. She'd prune for an hour, sometimes two. Never checked her phone. Never looked up at the house behind her. Just the roses, the soil, the quiet rhythm of her hands.

He told himself it was the garden. That he admired the discipline of it, how someone could give that kind of sustained attention to something living. But if he were honest, and Derek was trying, lately, to be honest even when it cost him, it wasn't the garden.

It was her.

She moved through the space like she owned every molecule of it. She'd pause mid-cut, studying a stem the way he studied a waveform, looking for the imperfection she could feel but hadn't located yet. Utterly, completely alone, and she seemed to prefer it that way.

He understood that. The preferring.

This particular Thursday, day forty-three technically, he was standing at the counter with his second cup when she did something she'd never done before.

She looked up.

Not at the house. At his window. Directly at him, shears poised mid-cut, as though she'd known exactly where he'd be and had simply been waiting for the right moment to confirm it. She stood slowly, wiping dirt from her hands onto her hips, and walked toward the fence with a stride that wasn't hurried but wasn't casual either. Purposeful. Like someone crossing a room to settle an argument.

She leaned her arms on the wood and held his gaze through the glass, taking her time about it.

Derek set his coffee on the counter.

His throat had gone dry in a way that made him feel seventeen. He hadn't felt seventeen in thirty-six years, and even then he'd been better at watching sound crews than talking to girls. He went to the back door. Opened it. Stepped onto his small patio.

"I couldn't help but notice how hard you work out here," he said, and immediately wanted to rewind the sentence and try again.

She let out a short laugh, more air than sound, and pushed a strand of hair from her face, leaving a streak of dirt across her cheek. "Hard work. That's what you're going with?" She clicked her tongue. "Most people just say 'nice flowers' and scurry back inside."

She crossed her arms. The sun caught the sheen of sweat on her collarbone.

"I'm Alexis. And you've been here, what, two weeks now? Three?"

"Six," he didn't say. "Closer to six," he didn't say.

"Long enough to develop a habit, apparently," she finished.

* * *

Her gate creaked when he opened it. She didn't look up. Let the silence stretch while she snipped another dead bloom.

"Good. You actually follow through." She glanced at him sideways. "That's refreshing."

She pointed to a pair of worn gardening gloves on the edge of a raised bed. "Put those on. The thorns don't care if you're new to this."

The gloves were too small. Women's medium. He pulled them on anyway, the seams tight across his knuckles, and she watched him approach without expression, reading how he moved, how he carried himself, cataloguing data he wasn't aware he was broadcasting. When he reached the pile of clippings, she nodded toward a wheelbarrow parked a few feet away.

"Start loading. And try not to step on the hydrangeas. They bruise if you look at them wrong."

She returned to her pruning, but something in the set of her shoulders told him she was tracking every sound behind her. The rustle of his shirt. The scrape of thorny branches against the metal wheelbarrow. The crunch of mulch under his shoes when he shifted weight.

"So what brings you to the neighborhood?" She clipped another stem without turning. "Quiet cul-de-sac, nosy neighbors, one of those 'fresh start' situations?"

"Fresh start," Derek said. He loaded a tangle of rose cuttings into the wheelbarrow, a thorn catching the back of his hand through the thin glove. "Horrible ex situation."

She stopped pruning for a beat. Resumed with a slightly more deliberate motion, as though the shears had gained half a pound.

"Ah. One of those." She snipped a particularly stubborn branch. "They usually are."