The roses were blooming.
Three of them — the ones David had dumped dirt on — had come back stronger than before.
"Tell him I got his message," I said.
"And tell him I'm keeping the house."
I hung up the phone.
I sat in that kitchen for a long time, looking at my garden through the window of a man who had tried to protect me when I didn't know I needed protecting.
Then I got up, walked out the front door, crossed the yard, and knelt beside my roses.
"Thank you," I said.
No one answered.
But the wind moved through the garden, and the roses nodded, and for the first time in three years, the fence between those two houses didn't feel like a wall.
It felt like a bridge someone had built in silence, and left behind for me to find.
---
Some people spend years fighting battles we never see.
They protect us quietly, from the other side of a fence, through a kitchen window, in letters they're too afraid to say out loud.
