Not in the garden, exactly—she had a tiny apartment above the garage of the last house. But her soul lived in that garden. She had coaxed it back from the brink of kudzu and poison ivy, replacing the chaos with order: neat rows of lavender, a circle of moonflowers that only opened at dusk, and a single bench carved from a fallen limb.

Aaliyah was there, pruning the lavender for winter. She didn’t look up.

Gary took off his hard hat. He sat on the bench. Aaliyah handed him a sprig of rosemary. “For remembrance,” she said. “Remember why you wanted to build things in the first place. Was it to fill a box with other people’s junk? Or was it to make something that lasts?”

He stopped at the garden.

On the last Saturday of October, the developer’s chief engineer came to see the lane for himself. He was a tired man in a hard hat named Gary. He walked the length of the asphalt, counting curb cuts.

Aaliyah waited until the end. Then she stood up.

Aaliyah was a quiet archivist of small things. She cataloged the first frost on the marigolds. She knew when the cardinal returned to the nest above the gate. She was twenty-four, with hands permanently stained green and a laugh that sounded like wind chimes in a gentle storm. The neighbors called her “that sweet girl who talks to her tomatoes.”

“I’m the one,” she agreed.