A month in, the veronica was dying. Not quickly. Not dramatically. It was doing what things did when they faded slowly, retreating inward, the stems going limp at their tips, the leaves losing their particular quality of aliveness without yet going yellow, still green but a duller green, a green that had forgotten what it was supposed to be doing.
She noticed it on a Wednesday morning.
She was doing her rounds, the way she did every morning, moving through the cottage with her hands checking each plant in turn, the quiet habitual conversation of her power moving through soil and root and stem. She reached the veronica last, the way she always did, saving it, and she put both hands to the earth around its base and felt for it. It was there. Barely. Thin and slow and retreating. She stood very still for a moment.
LSA: No.
She said it quietly. Not to anyone. To the plant, to the morning, to the particular cruelty of this specific thing happening to this specific plant.
LSA: No, you don't get to.
She checked everything. Moisture, drainage, soil composition, root spread. She pressed her power through her hands and into the earth as deep as it would go, searching for something she could fix, something she could point to and correct, a deficiency or an excess or anything with a name and a solution.
There was nothing with a name. There was nothing with a solution. There was only the slow retreating aliveness of it, the roots still reaching but weakly, the stems still standing but without conviction.
She repotted it.
She had already repotted it once but she did it again, new soil, a slightly larger pot to give the roots more room, repositioned it in the window with the kind of precise attention she gave to things that mattered. She watered it the exact right amount, not too much, not too little, and she stood back and looked at it.
It looked the same.
She put her hand near it without touching it and kept it there, the way she sometimes did when she needed to feel that something was still present. Her power moved from her palm into the air around the plant like a question.
The plant had no answer for her.
She thought about the day she had planted it. Three days after the funeral. The soil had been cold and she had warmed it with her hands before putting it in, the way you warmed a thing before you asked it to hold something important. She had planted it in the east facing bed where the morning light came first and she had told herself it was for the light and not because Maeve had always been the kind of person who arrived before everyone else.
She had not said anything when she planted it. She had not known what to say. She still did not know what to say, a month later, standing in her cottage with both hands near a dying plant and the wrong words arriving and the right ones nowhere she could find them.
LSA: I can't lose this one too.
She said it to the veronica. She said it to the room. She said it to Maeve, which was the same as saying it to no one, which was what she had been doing for a month and which had not helped anything and which she could not seem to stop.
She stayed by the window for a long time.
Outside the empty garden held its bare beds and its unoccupied trellises and its turned earth where she had lifted everything out, and the morning moved over it indifferently, the light falling on soil that had nothing to fall on, and Lisa stood inside with her hands near a dying plant and did not go out.
She would figure it out. She always figured it out.
She was very good at this and she would figure it out and the veronica would not die and she would not lose this one too, because she could not, because that was simply not something she was willing to allow, because some things were not negotiable and this was one of them. She watered it again. Just a little. Just in case.