Mare was somebody new — somebody with dirt under her nails and a decent tomato crop and a standing coffee date and a teenager who’d decided, against all odds, that she was worth showing up early for.

Mare had a place.

When I walked through that gate in the morning now, three or four people looked up and said her name, and the whole architecture of belonging that I thought I’d retired out of forever reassembled itself around me in a fenced vacant lot, made of nothing but shared dirt and shared time and the human insistence on feeding each other.

I did not expect to like her, Mare.