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Caspian bought those for me. They’ve been sitting untouched for weeks.

I get up and go back to bed, shutting the blinds and falling into the dark.

The next morning, I stare at the seeds while I eat a piece of toast. In the afternoon, I sit on the porch and stare at the yard. There’s a cleared patch of soil, half shaded beneath a plum tree.

I used to grow things, once.

Not with a trowel or a spade or seeds. With my hands and my thoughts and even with my love.

That light flashes in my eye. That invisible bone aches. And I go to bed.

The next day, I sit in the dirt and run my fingers through the soil. Even though the ground is dry, it feels good to get my hands in the earth.

And the next day, I sit there again, but this time, I’ve brought the trowel. The spade.

The seeds.

I pick up the packet. There’s a drawing of a carrot with a long, green stem. I hold the packet delicately in my hands and whisper to it, “But what if you don’t grow?”

It takes me a week of sitting in the dirt before I dig the first hole. My hands are trembling as I rip the top off the packet. I’m worried I’ll lose the seeds by how much I tremble, but somehow, I get them in the dirt. I pat them down softly with soil. We don’t own a watering can, so I fill a juice jug with water and drip it over. Then I lean down and whisper into the earth, “Please. Please grow. Please grow.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see someone standing on the porch, arms crossed, head tilted at a slight angle. Caspian doesn’t say anything, but the next morning, I find five more seed packets on the kitchen table.

Lettuce. Cucumbers. Turnips. Squash. Radishes. I plant them all, and every day, I run out to tend to the weeds, to water, to whisper into the earth, “Please grow. Please, please grow.”

One week later, there’s a small green sprout where I planted my radishes.

And all at once, color rushes back into my life. Green.

Not the phantasmal color of flame that once haunted us.

A new color.

The color of rebirth.

And maybe she sees color again too. Because one afternoon, when I’m weeding around the sprouts, a shadow drapes over me. She’s barefoot, wrapped in a blanket despite the heat, her hair matted and deep circles beneath her eyes. But my mother sits in the dirt with me.

It’s hard. Messy.

But we sit in the dirt together.

It’s a midsummer morning when Mom and I are harvesting a crop of lettuce. Caspian had found us both matching sun hats, and I’m grateful, because I’m still nursing a sunburn across my nose.

“I don’t get it,” I mumble, my face nearly touching the soil. “Everything else is growing but not the carrots. They were the very first thing I planted.”

“Patience,” Mom says. “They’ve got the deepest roots and the farthest to go.” She looks up, squinting into the brilliant sky. “But eventually, they’ll seek the sun.”

“Or I killed them,” I grumble.

“Probably that.”

The new voice makes me jump, and I look around before spotting a pasty white leg dangling down from the plum tree. I gaze up. Wrenley’s perched in the branches, dressed in a pair of my jean shorts and a tank top—both way too big on her. She’s wearing a pair of cat-eye sunglasses speckled with fake diamonds I recognize from one of the Seagull’s Gullet regular patrons. Birdy and her shiny things. She snatches a plum off a branch, bites into it, then gives me a shit-eating grin I can only imagine she picked up from Caspian.

Truthfully, I’m glad she’s wearing the sunglasses, even if she did steal them. Looking in her eyes only causes a stabbing sensation in my chest. Never again will that shade of blue belong to my father. Never again will his eyes twinkle with an idea or grow hazy with tiredness. It’s as if the last piece of him belongs to Wrenley.

“Aren’t you supposed to be at work?” I manage to ask.

“Day off.” Wrenley shrugs. “Well, kind of. I didn’t feel like going in today. Richard can figure it out.”