Page 1 of Until the Last Leaf Falls

Disconnected

The library app’s master dashboard took up all of Niles’s screen, a stack of green bars proclaiming satisfying metrics.

2.1 million active users.

87% weekly engagement.

14.3% MoM growth.

This was his creation—a system that connected people to books, easier and faster than any bricks-and-mortar library. He’d made his career building connections, yet he had never felt more alone.

When had he last spoken to another person? Niles chewed on his lower lip as he tried to remember. He’d sent emails to his sales team, certainly. He’d gone running and to the gym, but people there just nodded to each other. He’d ordered groceries and collected them from the concierge… Hah! They’d greeted each other and he’d thanked her for accepting his order. Were these really the only words he’d spoken in a week?

He turned to his second workstation where an estate agent’s listing showed an 18th-century posting house. Desirable location at end of High Street in small market town. Charming character property with development potential. Zooming in revealed a wonderful blank canvas comprising an overgrown courtyard surrounded by slightly shabby barns.

His phone’s chime interrupted him with a message from the lead of the sales team he’d hired. “Niles, the user analytics for the new recommendation algo are insane! We can’t sell this app fast enough. You’re a genius. Drinks later to celebrate?”

Niles’s fingers hovered over the keyboard, ready to draft a plausible excuse. He was excellent at those, especially when his mind translated ‘celebrate’ into music too loud to hear, shouted conversations that never moved beyond work, and people waiting for his reaction before committing themselves to mirth or outrage. He’d be the architect of the party, the one who funded the tab, and as invisible and incomprehensible to them all as the code running the system they were selling.

He closed the chat window without replying.

Forty floors below him, streams of people merged and mingled as they left their offices. A couple crossed the plaza, hands twined, their heads bent against the wind. A group of men—all suited—spilled out of a pub, their collective laughter swallowed by the distance before it could reach him.

He watched the bustle as he’d done countless times before while unravelling problems, the silence he craved never quite filling the room. What was the point of hiding himself away in the clouds if his servers kept humming, and the keyboard keys rattled while he worked? It only made it more obvious that none of the millions of people he was digitally connected to could be bothered to acknowledge him beyond a mundane greeting.

His gaze returned to the estate agent’s listing. To that courtyard of weeds and cobbles.

What if he built a different kind of silence? One filled with rustling leaves and the slow turn of the seasons, which changed without needing to be managed. A place where if he spoke, his words might be heard.

“Buying an old building in a town where I don’t know a single person won’t magically make me part of a community,” he muttered, magnifying the image further. “I’ll only be changing a few variables.”

Yet the courtyard held a strange appeal.

He could model user behaviour across petabytes of data. Was he really acting on a pixelated daydream about trees?

He filled out the contact form, typing at a frantic pace as if he might change his mind if he slowed, and clicked send, hands trembling with hope.

Before he could shut down his workstation, an app alert flashed on his screen.

Your Weekly Social Recap: 0 Interactions. 0 Messages. 0 Shared Reads.

The system, in its flawless, neutral logic, had just quantified his emptiness.

He closed the alert. He would renovate the posting house and build a library. Shelves filled with books and air that smelled of paper and patience. Maybe no one would come, but he’d build it anyway, for the same reason he was drawn to that courtyard—not to be found, but to prove to himself that he could plant a seed in the world, and tend it, even if he was the only one who ever saw it grow.

Overlooked

Five Years Later

The door closed with a quiet click.

Niles shifted the wicker basket, its weight a familiar ache in the crook of his arm. A fine mist had turned the air to gauze, muffling sound but amplifying scents until he breathed a cocktail of damp soil, sweet mulch, and the last hint of lawnmower exhaust. Early autumn. The scent of Tuesday. Thirteen houses. Thirteen efficient transactions.

‘Oh, it’s you.’

‘Here you are.’

‘Thank you.’