The mark was on the inside, no larger than Coralie’s thumb.
She held the lining toward the window, changed the angle, and saw it again: a pale brown shadow near the waist. It had been hidden by a fold when Bryony wore the dress. There was no reason to make a calamity of it, but Coralie knew how a small flaw could grow in a bride’s mind if it arrived without explanation.
She photographed the area and sent the picture with a short message. The outside was sound. She could replace the affected piece of lining. It would not change the shape they had agreed.
Then she put down her phone and waited before touching anything else.
Bryony called six minutes later.
“Is it a stain?”
“A little discolouration. Inside.”
“Can you see it when it’s on?”
“No.”
There was traffic behind Bryony, and a male voice asking which way they were going. She answered him without moving the phone far enough away. Coralie looked at the blue cotton bag on its hook and tried not to imagine the girl’s face.
“Sorry,” Bryony said. “Kit thinks I know every street in this town because I grew up here.”
“Are you all right with me replacing that section?”
“Yes. If you think it needs it.”
“I do.”
“Then yes. Do you need me to write it?”
“A text would help.”
“I’ll send one. Thank you for telling me.”
The call ended. The permission appeared a moment later, followed by a second message: Not the bit with Mom’s initials, right?
Coralie sent back a photograph of the tiny E.M., still untouched inside the bodice. She did not add a sentence about promises or memory. Bryony sent a heart, and that was enough.
At one, Coralie locked the dress away, checked the studio door, and went home to change her shoes. She had chosen old trainers, but she changed her shirt twice. The first felt like work. The second looked as though she had dressed to be noticed. She put the second one back on after standing in her bedroom in her bra for an unreasonable length of time.
Stellan was waiting beside the gate when she reached the old walled garden. He wore a faded green shirt, the sleeves rolled unevenly, and had a streak of earth on his forearm. The sight of him took a small, unnecessary breath out of her.
“You look as if you’ve been here all morning.”
“I have.”
“Wasn’t the idea to have an afternoon off?”
“It is afternoon now.”
He opened the gate. Beyond it, the garden had changed since the brief visit after coffee. More of the old planting had gone, exposing a stretch of wall above bare soil. Two beds were full, almost untidy, while another contained little except sticks and low green growth. A length of hose lay across the path. She tried to match what she saw to the rough drawing he had shown her.
Coralie had seen his eagerness and prepared herself to admire something beautiful. Now she was afraid her face would give her away.
“It looks more open now,” she said.
“Come this way.”
He led her past the bare bed to a corner where a white rose had climbed into an old pear tree. Sunlight caught the flowers against the dark leaves. Beneath them, blue and purple blooms crowded each other without seeming to mind.
“This part survived,” he said. “Most of it. We cleared what was choking it.”
“Oh, that’s lovely.”
He looked pleased. She was relieved, and because she was relieved she kept talking.
“You could make the other side match. Have the same curve all the way along. It would pull everything together.”
Stellan’s eyes went to the unfinished bed.
“I don’t want it to match.”
“Not exactly. Just the shape.”
“I understood.”
His tone was flat enough to stop her. Coralie put her hands in her pockets, finding an old receipt and a sweet wrapper. She had done it again: walked into something another person cared about and begun finding the places she would alter.
“You did say you might be annoyed,” she said.
He looked at her, then away. “I thought you’d ask what I was doing first.”
“You’re right.”
The answer surprised him. It did not immediately soften him. He stepped over the hose and coiled it out of their way, taking more care than the task required.
Coralie waited. A bird made a furious noise in the pear tree. She wondered whether to apologize again and decided it would only ask him to make her feel better.
“What are you doing?” she asked at last.
He glanced back. “Trying to make somewhere you can sit without looking at a job that needs doing.”
She looked at the sticks.
“Not there yet,” he said.
“I wasn’t going to say it.”
“You looked straight at the empty patch.”
He smiled a little. She moved beside him, careful not to step into the bed.
The owner had used this end of the garden for years, he explained, then stopped when her husband became ill. Coralie hadn’t heard that part on her first visit. Last winter the woman had asked him what it would take to make it somewhere she wanted to go again. He had given her a sensible answer and then gone home with a much less sensible idea.
“I kept drawing it,” he said. “After I’d already sent the price for clearing it.”
“Did she ask for all this?”
“Eventually. After I showed her.”
“How much of this is the extra bit you told me about?”
“Most of what I did this morning.” He gave her a sideways look. “I haven’t forgotten the paid jobs.”
She smiled. He wanted to try things he could not justify in every customer’s front garden. He had moved the old bench to make room for the curving path and was still deciding where it belonged. The drawing he had shown her had changed again. He hoped that, in time, the garden would offer different places to stop without showing everything at once.
He was not eloquent about it. He stopped to point, began a sentence twice, and finally picked up a stick to mark a curve in the soil. Coralie crouched beside him. Looking from that height, she could see how the gap he had left would open toward the tree.
“There,” she said. “I see it.”
“You don’t have to.”
“No, I do. I was looking from the gate.”
He drew the stick back through his mark. “Most people do.”
She picked a crumb of earth from the toe of her trainer. “I think I wanted to be useful.”
“You can just come.”
“I’m learning.”
He held out a hand to help her stand. She took it and came up too quickly, nearly colliding with him. His other hand steadied her at the waist. For a moment neither of them pretended that standing was the only reason to stay close.
“Your shirt,” he said.
“What about it?”
“I like it.”
She looked down at the narrow opening at her throat, then back at him. “Very detailed assessment.”
“I’m trying not to make it worse.”
She kissed him first. His mouth warmed beneath hers; his hand moved from her waist to the small of her back. A faint smell of sun and crushed leaves clung to him. She wanted to put her fingers under the edge of his shirt and did not, because there was a house beyond the wall and she had no idea when its owner might return.
Stellan drew back with a breath that made her glad she was not the only one trying to remember where they were.
“I brought something to sit on,” he said.
“That sounds like planning.”
“Only a blanket.”
They sat beneath the pear tree. The blanket was thick and old, with a hole near one edge. He had brought water and sandwiches, which she ate without asking what was in them until she reached something unexpectedly sharp.
“Mustard,” he said, seeing her face. “Too much?”
“I can feel my ears.”
He offered to swap. She refused, then changed her mind, and he laughed while they exchanged halves.
For a while they watched a bee trying to enter a flower that was already occupied. Stellan leaned back against the tree, his arm beside hers. Coralie could hear distant traffic but not make out individual cars. The small sounds of the garden seemed to have moved closer.
“Was Elspeth interested in this?” she asked.
“This garden? No. I started here after.”
“Gardens, then.”
“She liked sitting in them.” His mouth curved. “She would have liked this bit. Not the dirt.”
Coralie waited for more. He picked a loose thread from the blanket.
“People keep asking whether I put things in for her,” he said. “A tree, or flowers she liked. Sometimes I do. This isn’t that.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know.”
She took a drink of water. He had not sounded wounded, only tired of a question that she had nearly asked without knowing it.
“What did she hate?” Coralie asked.
He looked at her sharply, then laughed. “That grass people put in pots. The feathery stuff. Said it looked like a neglected broom.”
“Do you like it?”
“Some of it.”
“Have you got any?”
“At home. Two enormous pots.”
Coralie laughed with him. She could picture the argument, ordinary and repeated, without needing to know who had won. It made the woman in his past feel more real and less like a portrait someone might expect Coralie to stand beside.
Later he showed her a corner that had failed completely. The plants had not taken, and a delivery had been wrong, and he had lost his temper with the wrong member of his crew. He was still irritated by the delivery and embarrassed about the crew member.
“Did you tell him?”
“Yes. Bought him lunch too, but I don’t think he cared about that.”
“What did he say?”
“That I was being a pain.”
She smiled. “Sounds fair.”
“It was.”
He showed her the new growth at the base of a plant she would have assumed was dead. She knelt to look because he was pleased, not because she needed to understand how it had happened. When he began explaining the soil, she touched his wrist.
“I believe you. I will not retain any of that.”
“Right.” He looked almost relieved. “Shall we go somewhere with chairs?”
“In a minute.”
She walked back to the gate and turned. He remained where he was, watching her with his hands loose at his sides. From here she could see the place she had mistaken for an unfinished edge and the line that would eventually lead past it. She still would not have designed it that way. She liked knowing why he had.
“What?” he called.
“Nothing.”
“That’s a suspicious nothing.”
She returned to him by the longer path. At the bend he reached out, as if to guide her around a low branch, and she ducked beneath it before he could help. A leaf caught in her hair. He took it out and held it between them.
“Souvenir.”
“Will you charge me?”
“You can have that one.”
She put it in her pocket, then felt foolish and left it there. He had gone to collect the blanket. She watched him shake it, the quick pull of his shoulders, the way he checked the ground before folding it so nothing living would be caught inside. He was not looking at her. She liked having a moment to look at him without being observed herself.
At the gate he asked whether she would come again when the bare bed had grown in.
“How long does that take?”
“A while.”
“That’s not a date.”
“No.” He tucked the blanket under his arm. “I can ask for one of those as well.”
“Please do.”
He locked the gate and put the key away. Neither of them moved toward the cars.
“We could walk to the café,” he said. “Leave the cars here for a bit.”
“It’s going to rain.”
He looked at the sky. “Probably.”
She took his hand before he could offer the sensible alternative.
They stopped at a small café on the way back. Stellan ordered something too large and Coralie helped him finish it. Rain began while they were there, sudden and hard against the window. He looked out, pleased about the garden, and she felt a tenderness so quick that she hid it by reaching for her glass.
He asked what she wanted to do next weekend.
The date arrived in her mind before she could prepare for it. June third. She had been moving toward it for months and away from it for four weeks. She knew where she should have been at that hour, knew which woman would have been arranging her hair, knew the music she had chosen for walking into a room full of people.
“Coralie?”
She put down the glass. “Saturday was meant to be my wedding.”
Stellan’s expression changed. Not pity exactly, but care so visible that it made her eyes sting.
“I don’t know what I want to do,” she said quickly.
“All right.”
“I might be terrible company.”
He nodded, accepting the warning rather than arguing with it. “You can tell me.”
Outside, a woman ran past with a newspaper over her head. Coralie watched until she had gone. When she looked back, Stellan had moved his hand across the table, palm up, leaving a space between them.
She put her hand in it. The rain went on, and neither of them tried to decide Saturday before it came.