Page 2 of Until the Last Leaf Falls

‘Have a lovely day.’

Not one of those words meant anything. They were just noise filling the seconds while swapping Book A for Book B.

Niles had built his fortune by making transactions frictionless. He’d optimised his own life right alongside his work, but now he missed those awkward pauses, the stumbling conversations, the expression on someone’s face that said, ‘I’m listening.’

Book basket on his arm, he drifted down the hill. The path through the park was a tunnel of shedding trees. Last week, they’d been a riot of amber, scarlet, russet, and gold. Now, the leaves were crisp, brown relics, raked into neatish piles. He loved their rustle, but to disturb them felt like a demand for attention he had no right to.

With a sigh, he stayed in the centre of the path and hastened his steps until he reached his home and passed through the carriage arch into silence. Not the inattentive quiet of his book round, nor the public calm of the park, but a private, curated stillness. His silence.

He’d bought the house with its three barns and central courtyard after nothing more than an online perusal, a ramshackle fairy tale at the end of the High Street. The architect he’d hired had taken one look at the weed-filled square and seen convenient parking. Niles had seen a glade. Trees and shrubs that marked the passing of the seasons, offering joy in spring, shade in summer, colour in autumn, and an austere beauty during the darkest, coldest months of the year.

He’d spent that first autumn talking to arborists and garden designers, and the winter digging up the courtyard and improving the soil. Now his glade was a reality, a captive piece of woodland in a stone embrace. He’d planted a delicate birch, a brooding spruce, a fire-leaved maple, and a ginkgo that marked autumn by turning its leaves the colour of antique gold. They, together with an elegant rowan and a young oak were his family, his audience. So what if he was the one person in town nobody noticed? He had his books and the trees for company.

Leaves enough for a lifetime.

Written on Leaves

The sun gilded the roof of the library barn when Niles stepped into his glade, travel mug of coffee in one hand.

“Good morning,” he greeted the trees, a ritual he’d followed since the day he’d planted the birch and the spruce. He didn’t have to pass through the glade to open the library—didn’t have to leave the house at all—but since he’d brought the trees into the courtyard, Niles refused to ignore them.

Trees needed sun and sky, water, food, and each other, but Niles didn’t want them to miss the company of other trees or the wider world. He shared news, memories, and the small joys and annoyances that marked his days, spending as much time in his glade as he could.

A few moments with a coffee.

An afternoon with a book.

And when the weather was too perfect to be inside, he brought his work outside, too.

His trees, while confined to the courtyard, thrived and grew. They gave him blossom in the spring, dappled green shade and the cooling rustle of leaves in the summer, and glorious colour in autumn. In the winter they slept, but even then, Niles visited them daily. He spoke to the dreaming trees, and having their company comforted him.

“I’m compiling the next iteration of the new app today,” he said, settling himself onto the bench between the ginkgo and the maple. “While the program runs, I’ll come and sit with you out here.” He gestured upwards. “The sky says it’s going to be a glorious autumn day and I’m enjoying your colours very much. Do you wish you could change them faster and go to sleep? Or do you enjoy these last days of warmth and sunshine?”

A ripple of amusement washed over Niles, along with the brief sensation of stretching tall after being hunched over his desk for hours. The image was so vivid he straightened where he sat and only just remembered the mug in his hand before he raised his arms.

“A fine impression I’d give, opening the library wearing my morning coffee,” he chuckled.

There was little need to open the library, on time or not. Book browsing seemed to have gone out of fashion. His regular customers ordered their books online and he delivered them to their homes, collecting the read ones at the same time. It made him more of a book depository than a library, yet he still opened the place because now and then someone wandered in.

They might have missed their bus and needed a warm, dry place to wait for the next one, or they just didn’t want to go home. Niles didn’t mind and didn’t ask. He welcomed and cherished each visitor, especially the very few who came to talk about books.

He finished his coffee and stood. “Time to open the library. I’ll be back later to tell you about all the exciting things happening in my life.”

His courtyard was sheltered from the wind, but a rustle of leaves answered him like an audible smile. And Niles looked up at his trees and smiled back.

Mornings in the library followed a pattern. Niles made coffee, then gave the place a quick dusting. He checked his library app for books ordered overnight and set them aside for his next book delivery round. After that, the day was his and he settled in the corner near the coffee machine to work on his latest programming project.

Since people weren’t coming to the library to discuss books face-to-face, he was building an app to let them do so from the comfort of their homes and phones.

Librarians had long requested such an app, so Niles built them what they wanted, never mind that it chafed him. He wanted technology to remove the chores, so people could spend more time together. But the opposite was happening. Apps took the place of human interaction, sapped joy and creativity, and left the chores for people to do.

It made no sense to him.

Maybe getting people talking, even if it was anonymously on an app, was better than not having them connect at all. And the app would be of use to people too ill to leave their houses, unable to afford frequent transport into town, or too far away to join a local book discussion group.

“I’m still not sure if releasing it will make things better or not,” he said aloud. And pressed the compile button anyway.

With nothing else to do but wait on his code, Niles traded the library for the bench in his glade. He sat in the sunshine with a third mug of coffee and read—a welcome reward for hours of focussed, detailed work.