Hecate's Tale

Andy watched Samson Drei curl up near his left foot, huffing in contentment as the dog closed his eyes to rest. Looking back at Arabella, Andy asked, “Why Hecate?”

Arabella let the question sit. “Because she is what’s left when everything else is gone. The keeper of the gates. The last light at the crossroads.” She traced a line down her dress, as if following a seam. “She was a way to witness all the endings at once, and not be crushed by them. Or so I thought.”

“People remember her as a goddess of the dead,” she went on, “and they’re not wrong, but they get the reason wrong. It wasn’t Hecate who chose that company. It was the echo of Geshtinanna, of Dumuzid, of Inanna's ordeal in Irkalla. That shape didn't stay in one story. It found its way into whatever soil was left. I’ve seen it surface as far off as Greece, in a young goddess and a pomegranate and a mother who wouldn’t let the earth grow anything until her daughter came home. Different names. Different gods. Same descent from the echoes of that older event.” Her eyes went distant, toward some other garden entirely. “I call her sister when I see her. Persephone, I mean. She is one, in every way that matters to something like me. Whatever pulled Persephone under the ground was pulling on the same thread as whatever pulled Inanna. Even historians in your world have wondered at these echoes.”

“And the witchcraft,” she added, almost as an afterthought, “came later, and I never asked for it. Every Master and every Contestant who crossed a threshold I kept left carrying something they hadn’t had walking in — a boon, a transformation, a shape they didn’t wear before. To anyone watching from the outside, that looked exactly like sorcery. Give that a few centuries and the stories simply decided I was not merely a keeper of the boundaries, but a patron of witchcraft and magic. I let them. It was closer to true than most of what they said about me.”

Andy absorbed that, trying to imagine the centuries of standing in the dark, seeing everyone you ever cared for vanish, and then deciding to keep going anyway.

Arabella watched him, a faint challenge in her gaze. “You’re thinking about the power again.”

He blinked at the change of subject. “Yeah. I am.”

Arabella looked at Andy with a half-smile, as if she already knew he would admit it. She lifted her hand and gestured to the garden paths in front of them—one, two, three, four, splitting away from the old stone bench like veins in a living leaf. Each was perfectly kept, pebbled and edged with bursts of color, but none led to the same destination. For a moment, Andy saw the whole thing the way she must: not a garden, but a map of possibility, of choices that led away from the center in lines that could never double back.

“This is the shape of her,” Arabella said. “Of Hecate, I mean. Not a destiny-setter, not a planner of seasons. Just the keeper of the places where roads part, and the only light at the place where a person has to choose which way to go. That was always her domain—the in-between, the moment before the step.”

Her green eyes looked at him, old beyond reckoning. “It was never only roads, either,” she added. “Any threshold counted — the second between waking and sleep, the hour between one year and the next, the space between what someone was and what they were about to become. Wherever a boundary held, I was the one keeping it standing, so that at least it was a real boundary, and not a false one.”

He let that hang. The garden hummed with morning. Sunlight scattered in shifting patches, leaves flickering, and from somewhere deeper in the trees, the burble of water found its way through the hush.

Arabella kept her hand up, tracing the line of one path, then another. “I was always the guardian of the crossroads. Every crossroad mattered, because every crossroad could go wrong. And I was never there to judge which path was better. My job—her job—was to hold the light and let them see. The game was the light. Sometimes that meant they saw only the monsters waiting on the other side. Sometimes it meant seeing the road wasn’t closed at all, that the barriers were only in them. And sometimes it meant showing them the monster within.”

Andy said, “You could always see the monsters, though.”

Arabella nodded, a flick of gold in her hair. “Every time. Sometimes before they even left the shadows.”

She drew a deep breath, as if remembering the weight of it. “For a long time, I thought bringing light to the crossings was enough. I believed it made a difference, just to let people see what was really there. But I learned, very quickly, that the light doesn’t change the outcome. It only changes the story people tell about why they walked the road they did.”

He picked a leaf from the armrest and crumbled it between his fingers. “What does it do, then?”

Arabella tilted her head, considering him. “It makes sure nobody has the excuse of ignorance. That was the only mercy I would offer.”

There was an edge in that—something both clinical and mournful. Andy said, “But you could still guide them, right? You could… push.”

She smiled, wry. “That was what the Masters always assumed. That the Host could tip a scale, rig a vote, warn the good and doom the wicked. Geshtinanna, bearer of such sorrow, might have. Seshat, less so, and only to take a better measure. But as Hecate, I never did. I could bring someone to the edge, lay out every road in their name, and never once take a step on their behalf. The step belonged to the traveler or it didn’t happen at all.” She paused. “And a crossing made by someone else for you is no crossing at all. The road stays shut.”

She looked at him with the flat certainty of someone reporting a law of physics. “Hecate had no one she wanted that for. But I discovered it because I watched others try—Masters who thought they could carry their Contestants through, Contestants who believed the Host could make the step for them—and I observed the result every time. The light came through. The one who chose to cross the threshold came through. The one they were trying to carry was still on the other side, and the threshold registered nothing. It is not a rule. It is the nature of what a threshold is.” She picked a small leaf off the bench and let it fall. “You can illuminate a crossing for a thousand years. You cannot cross it for anyone.”

Andy felt that in his sternum, an ache under the bone. “That’s… harsh.”

Arabella met his eyes. “It is. But it’s true. Hecate was the judge only in the sense that she enforced the rule: if you don’t walk your own path, the path vanishes ahead of you. Even the mercy of warning, even the gift of a map, only matters if you have the stomach to follow it.”

He tried to imagine the weight of that—how it must have felt to be the keeper of gates, and have everyone blame you for not making the choice for them.

“So you never interfered?” he asked.

A soft laugh. “No. My job was endings. If I had to enforce a rule, it was always at the gate: let the soul through, or shut it out. The rest was for them to do.”

She flexed her fingers, as if the light from her hand was still there. “I saw good people fail, and bad ones prosper, but I never once picked a winner. That wasn’t the game I played. I would enforce the law of consequences. The law I kept was that once the path was shown, every consequence was actually chosen by the one who walked it.”

Andy looked at her, at the perfect poise and the iron in her voice. “But what if they chose wrong? If the monster on the road was too much, and they fell?”

Arabella’s eyes were kind, but there was nothing soft in her answer. “Then they fell. And the story ended.” She glanced at Samson Drei, who had rolled onto his side and was now pawing at a spot in the grass, content. “I ran seasons where the best people lost to their own fear, and seasons where the worst ones chose to take the step down the path to self-destruction. It never surprised me. It still doesn’t.”

He stared out past the bench, to where the three garden paths split and twisted through the trees. “That’s… not what I thought you’d say.”

Arabella said nothing, letting him sit in it.

He tried again. “You said the seasons got darker. Was that because you let more monsters in?”

She smiled, a flicker of her old Host self. “No. They were always there. The only thing that changed was how honest I got about not saving anyone from themselves.” She rested her elbows on her knees, hands together. “And sometimes, Andy, the worst monsters were the ones I invited to the game on purpose. Because I knew that only a real challenge could make a real crossing.”

Andy looked at the paths again. “What did you do, when you invited the monster in?”

Arabella's expression did not change. “I gave him exactly what he asked for.”

She was quiet for a moment, as if deciding how much of this to say aloud. Then she said: "There was a Master, in the early centuries of the Greek era. Kallias. He came to the game with a ledger. Every woman in his harem had, in his accounting, wronged him. One had humiliated him publicly—or so he believed; the truth was that a mutual acquaintance had spread a story, and she had never said the thing he thought she said, and did not know he believed she had. One had rejected him—or so he believed; she had simply not been drawn to him, which is not a wrong, but he had decided it was. Another had chosen someone else—a direct insult, in his accounting—when in reality the choice had nothing to do with him at all. He had not factored into her decision, and the invisibility of that was, to him, the worst offense of all.”

She turned a leaf over in her fingers. “Each woman on the ledger had a story. In none of those stories had she knowingly harmed him. But he had built his life around the certainty that they had, and he came to the season to be repaid.”

Andy looked at her. “Did you tell him?”

“No.”

“Did you know? When you built the cast?”

Arabella looked at him with Hecate's eyes, which were not unkind and were not kind. “Yes.”

He sat with that.

“He wielded the season,” she said. “He was not gratuitously cruel—he was something worse. He was righteous. He believed every action was proportionate, every consequence deserved, every elimination a correction of a ledger that was entirely false. Two women were eliminated before the season's midpoint. He did not enjoy it. He believed it was justice, and that belief made it worse.” She paused. “I watched.”

“What happened?” Andy asked.

“Someone showed him,” Arabella said. “Not me. One of the remaining women, who had found some of his accounting in a diary he kept for himself—the accounting was detailed, which is the way of men who believe they are owed. She laid it out for him: the story he had told himself about her, and then the truth of what had actually occurred. She was not kind about it. Her sister had been eliminated by then, and she had nothing left to lose.” Arabella folded her hands. “He spent perhaps an hour believing she was lying. Then he summoned me, and asked me. And Hecate, like me, never lied. So the architecture collapsed. All of it, simultaneously. Not one story but all of them, because if one was false they were all suspect, and he had enough intelligence to run the logic to its end.”

The garden held the silence.

“He broke,” Arabella said. “Completely. Not from guilt, at first—from the vertigo of discovering that the floor he had been standing on was not there. And then from guilt, which was worse, because the two women who had been eliminated were already gone, and the elimination had been his, and it had been wrong, and there was nothing to be done.” She looked at Samson Drei, who slept on, undisturbed. “The remaining women broke with him. Not from sympathy—most of them had no particular sympathy left to give. But because the season had been built around his certainty, and when his certainty was gone the whole structure that had held them in their roles went with it. They had organized their resistance around his belief. Without it, they had nothing to push against.”

Andy said, carefully, “Were the women innocent?”

Arabella considered. “They were not spotless.” She paused. “But they had not wronged him. Not before. Not in the ways he had been certain of. And whatever they had done inside the season was, in part, what he had made possible by treating them as debtors. A Master who decides his Contestants owe him something does not get a harem. He gets people who are surviving him.” She looked at Andy steadily. “The responsibility for what those women became inside that season was his. He abdicated it the moment he decided they were the ones who owed the debt. That abdication is what broke everything.”

Andy was quiet for a long time.

"That,” Arabella said, “is the closest I will come to admitting that Hecate was wrong. Not in the running of the season. I ran it correctly. But in the building of it. I knew. I could have chosen differently.” She looked at the four paths. “I chose not to.”

“Why?” Andy said.

She looked at him. “Because I wanted to see what happened when a man who believed himself the wronged party was given everything he asked for.” The answer was flat, without remorse. “Hecate was curious about crossroads, Andy. She did not care which road you took. She cared what you found when you got there.”

Samson Drei woke briefly, looked at nothing in particular, and went back to sleep.

The words landed. Andy thought about Claire, and the forked path of every woman in the Hotel, and what it meant to be brought to the edge and not know which road would keep you alive.

He asked, “Was there ever a time you thought about taking a step for someone, anyway? Even though you knew it wouldn’t stick?”

Arabella watched him, a glint in her eye. “There was one. Only once.”

Andy waited, but she said nothing more.

“What happened?”

She looked away, to the far side of the garden. The air was shifting, the scent of mango stronger now, and something—a bird, or a hidden squirrel—rustled the branches above their heads.

She said, “It was early on in my tenure as Hecate, when echoes of my old selves still sometimes surfaced. The man was a monster. But I thought, if I carried the torch for him, maybe he would see the better way. I brought him all the way to the last crossing and shone the light so bright he could not help but see what waited if he kept going.”

“And?” Andy asked.

“He spat at the light and walked away. And when he did, I realized it wasn’t a failure of the torch, or the path, or even of the monsters. It was a failure in him, and nothing I did could change it.”

She let out a breath, slow and even. “So after that, I stopped pretending I could save anyone by leading them to the road myself.”

Andy nodded, slowly, letting the metaphor root in him. “So what’s the point of the light, then?”

She smiled, a glint of humor behind the old pain. “The point of the light is that even in the dark, you can see the step you have to make. Nobody ever said the road had to be easy. Just that it had to be real.”

He sat with that a long time. The garden felt different now—still beautiful, still calm, but the shade of the acacia felt heavier, the crossings more urgent.

Arabella looked at him, and for the first time he saw something like exhaustion in her. “I never wanted to be the judge, Andy. But it was an escape from grief, a way to take control after losing so much. Anna’s gift had changed me, and at the time, seeing so many ancient ones leave the world, sensing the first of my siblings to pass, I felt it to be a curse. And someone had to keep the gates. Someone had to be there when the world split in pieces.”

He tried to think of anything that could follow that, but found nothing. Samson Drei barked, once, sharp and high, as if he wanted the world to know he agreed.

The two of them sat, side by side, watching the paths and the way the morning kept on being morning, regardless of whether anyone chose to walk it.

After a while, Andy said, “Tell me about the dark ones. The seasons that taught you most.”

Arabella looked at him. “There were plenty, in Hecate's time,” she said, and began to.

She told the first story quietly, her voice barely above the morning, eyes fixed on the garden’s branching veins as if she were reading them like a case file.

“There was a season I ran in the third century. The Master's name was Lucius Titus Quinctilius — the youngest of the Quinctilius sons of Cumae, never meant to carry the family name forward, which might have been the whole of his trouble. He was not a man I had any respect for, but that is true of many Masters, and it is not the point of the game.” She paused. “The cast was built in the usual way. One of the women — Phaedra — had a history with him that predated the season. Something had passed between her family and his, the kind of thing that leaves a mark without leaving a body. She had come to the game with a specific purpose, and I had known it when I chose her, and I had chosen her anyway.”

Andy watched her.

“The season ran,” Arabella said. “Lucius was the kind of Master who believed the harem existed to confirm something he had already decided about himself. The women organized around him as if he were a fixed point, some pulling toward it and some pushing away, and the whole thing moved in the slow circles of a season that has found its pattern.” She looked at the acacia. “Toward the end, several of them reached the point a harem like his reaches, if it’s left to fester long enough. They stopped competing for him and started conspiring against him. Quietly. Thoroughly. They meant to kill him before the season closed and let the show swallow the explanation.”

“All of them?”

“Not Phaedra. She had the oldest claim on him of anyone in that garden, and the best reason to want him dead. And she was the one who didn’t join them. When the others moved, she put herself between them and him.”

“Why, if she wanted him dead more than any of them?”

Arabella turned her hands over in her lap. “She told me, after. She said she could not let others hurt Lucius, because she needed to be the one who did. Not mercy. Not a change of heart. A claim. Her family had held that debt for a generation, and she was not going to let six strangers spend it for her, on a night that wasn’t hers to choose.”

Andy said nothing.

“That’s what broke it,” Arabella said. “Not a rule. Not me. A conspiracy needs everyone pulling in the same direction, and the one woman with the most right to pull stepped out of it. Without her, the others didn’t have the will to finish what they’d started, and a moment like that doesn’t come back once it’s passed. Lucius never knew how close he’d come. He walked out of that season carrying everything he had been, unchanged — believing, completely, that Phaedra had thrown herself between him and death out of love. That belief was the only thing she needed from him. It bought her what his ego had never given anyone else: his unguarded trust. When the season ended, he chose her, exactly the way she had spent the whole season making sure he would.”

“And Lucius went free.”

“Lucius walked out,” Arabella said. “Phaedra got the season she’d built. I stood at the gate and let them both through, because that is what a threshold does. It doesn’t ask what you intend to do on the other side. It only asks whether the step is yours.” She looked at the paths. “I have thought about it many times since. She murdered him two weeks after they returned home. Not in anger. Deliberately, by a method quiet enough that no one who’d watched her throw herself between him and a room full of murderous women ever thought to look twice at her.”

“Did you know? While it was happening — that she meant to use it that way?”

“I knew what she wanted, walking in. I didn’t know she would find a way to get it that was slower and crueler than the one the others had planned, and entirely her own. What she did was not what I expected from her. It was not what I had placed her there to do.”

“Did you try to stop her?” Andy asked. “Before she crossed the line.”

Arabella’s expression was the first truly cold thing in the conversation. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because by then it wasn’t my season to stop. She had already made her step, back in that room, the moment she chose to save him instead of letting the others take him. Everything after was only her collecting on what that step had bought her.” A pause. “And because I wanted to see what happened, if I left them to their own devices. Even if it meant punishing Phaedra for breaking the cardinal rule.”

Andy looked at her.

“I told you Hecate was a monster,” she said, without apology.

Samson Drei shifted again, sighing a little dog sigh, then settling back to sleep.

“I think of her sometimes. I understand, now, how easy it would be to want it — to make an ending that belongs to everyone into something only I paid for, so I'd be the one who got to decide what it meant. Phaedra didn't save Lucius. She bought him. The end result was the same, but she paid for it the most.”

She looked at Andy, then at the three garden paths, and the shadowy junction where they began. “I remember sitting just like this, in a place a lot like this one, and watching the sun come up after. I remember thinking that maybe even the keeper of the gates needed to be kept by something, or else the whole system rotted from the inside.”

Andy found himself without words for a moment. “Did you ever fix it? The rule, I mean.”

Arabella smiled, more gently. “Not really. It’s the same rule you live under, Andy. If you take responsibility for someone, you can’t ever let go of it. If you harm the ones you hold, there’s a price. And if you harm anyone the Hotel hosted, there's a price for that too. It’s the rule Greg broke, the reckoning that came for him.”

He thought of the women in the Hotel, the history he shared with each, the debts he held and the ones he owed. He tried to find himself in the story, and didn’t like the shape it made.

“Did he ever come back?” Andy asked. “The Master, Quinctilius. Did you ever see him again, before his death?”

Arabella shook her head, slow. “Never in this world. But his death disgraced the family. They lost power, wealth, influence. They had always been a family of pragmatic means, but now those dealings—murders, snuggling, and so on—came to the attention of Roman law. Lucius's death was the death knell for his family's fortunes.”

They sat in the hush, the garden holding its breath, as if the wind itself was waiting for a verdict.

After a long time, Arabella said, “It’s a strange thing, being the judge and also the one who has to carry out the sentence.”

Andy said, “I don’t know if I could do it.”

She looked at him, a glint of something old and sharp in her eyes. “You already are, even if you don't realize it.”

After a while, Arabella spoke again, the words coming as if they had always been waiting.

“Lucius’s story brought something back for me. I told you the story of Nin-Imma, the Sumerian priestess of measures, cursed into eternal servitude. The story I told yesterday ended at her worst day: chained, her name cut out of the world, her judgment twisted so she could never again see right from wrong.” She drew her fingers together, as if stitching two points in time. “But that’s not the end. It’s just where the grief felt sharpest.”

Andy listened, silent, attentive.

“I left out what happened to the king. Uta-Misharam was his name, and he was a magician, but every magic comes by a rule and every authority comes with a cost. The power he wielded to doom Nin-Imma was never his to begin with. It was borrowed — lent to him by the gods he served, the way a steward is lent the keys to a house he will never own. There were terms attached to the loan, as there always are. It could be used to punish, but only for a reason that would stand to judgment. When he spent it to ruin a woman whose only fault was refusing to cheat a measure, it split his own binding at the root.”

She picked at a thread in her skirt, eyes down. “He didn’t lose his authority, not at first. But it turned on him. Every time he tried to use it after, it answered him sideways, or worse. He kept trying—he was king, he could do nothing else—but the more he used the power, the deeper it twisted. At the end, the thing he had used to chain Nin-Imma did not fade. It drew itself tight around him, until he was dragged down, in the same manner and to a fate more terrible than hers.”

Andy absorbed that, the geometry of it fitting into the logic of the morning, and wondered, not for the first time, whose keys he'd actually been given.

Arabella continued: “I’ve watched the same thing repeat across a dozen worlds and a hundred thousand years. It’s never the power itself that punishes — power doesn’t care. It’s the terms of the loan. The moment an agent, a king, a priest, anyone who was only ever a steward of someone else’s authority, turns borrowed power to a use it was never lent for, the recoil is always absolute. It does not land on the one it was used against. It lands on the hand that turned it.”

They sat with it, the injustice and the physics of it, the names of the wounded and the names of the ones who did the wounding hanging like fog over the crossing.

The garden was utterly still, the light shifting by invisible degrees.

Andy looked at Arabella, the woman who had been a goddess, a host, a judge, and wondered how many times she’d watched the same pattern repeat.

He didn’t ask her, and she didn’t offer an answer.

---

The sun had climbed higher, not that either of them noticed. Time in the garden moved in pulses, not minutes—sometimes slow, sometimes skipping ahead, the way it did in dreams. Arabella let her next words wait until she was certain Andy was ready to hear them.

“There was a goddess I knew,” she said. “Not in the old days—by then most of them had left, or already thinned down to almost nothing—but in the long grey era after, when even the memory of worship had faded to rumor. She did not see what was coming, but her husband did, and so did I. We both knew she’d disappear soon, not like Isis had. A death, fading into nothing.” Arabella looked at the garden paths, eyes soft. “I helped him ensure she would not vanish, but the cost was to break her apart instead. We built a way for her to come apart on purpose, so that instead of needing a hundred thousand hearts, each new self would only need a hundred. Or even just one.”

Andy blinked, trying to grasp the scale of it.

“Her husband called it a shattering,” Arabella said, smiling. “But it was more like a miracle of conservation. Each shard a smaller, brighter echo of the first. Each able to live in the world on what little belief was left.” She reached for a metaphor, found it in the split of sunlight across the bench: “She became a cloud of herself, not a single memory. And that was how she survived.”

Andy asked, “Who was she?”

Arabella paused. “It’s not mine to say. You may find out, someday.”

He tried to picture it, the mathematics of a god becoming dozens, each a fractional but independent self. It was dizzying, but the underlying logic was there—a system surviving by its own ingenuity, the way forests regrow from a single shoot.

Arabella stood, brushing a bit of acacia leaf from her skirt. “Hecate outlasted every other self I’ve worn on this world. Hundreds of years. More than any dynasty, more than any memory. Sometimes I think I am still her, just with all the edges blunted by time.” She glanced at Andy, a sad pride behind the words. “I started to believe there would never be an end to her.”

She made as if to walk, then stopped, her hand on the back of the bench. “Would you like to know what finally ended it?”

Andy nodded, careful.

“It was Horun,” Arabella said, and even now, saying the name, her voice changed. “My last sibling. The only other first-generation Host left by then. He died sometime in the ninth or tenth century, not long before Byzantium itself started to die.”

She paused, and when she went on, her voice had dropped to something closer to a confession than a story.

“When one of us dies — a first-generation Host, I mean — whatever they’re still carrying doesn’t simply vanish. It has to go somewhere. I told you this, before. We were a closed circuit. So all that Horun had been, and all that Horun had carried of our other siblings, it all went into me. Five lifetimes' worth of memories, laid under his own sixth lifetime like sediment. Whatever was left of their power, folded into what he carried. He was the last place all of that had to live, and when he went, everything he’d been holding came due at once, and there was only one door left open for it to pass through.”

She looked down at her own hands, as if checking that they were still hers.

“I felt six lifetimes I had never lived arrive inside me in a single night. Six sets of memory that weren’t mine. Six kinds of grief that weren’t mine, stacked on top of my own grief for Horun himself, who I had just watched go the way all the others had gone.” Her voice was very even, the way it only got when she was working hard to keep it that way. “And underneath all of it, the plain fact that there was no one left. Not a sibling. Not a rival. Not one other first-generation thing anywhere in the world who remembered what I remembered, or who I had been before I was anyone at all.”

Andy said nothing. He wasn’t sure there was a right thing to say.

“Hecate was built to be cold,” Arabella said. “Distance, on purpose, so grief would have nothing to hold onto. It worked, for centuries, against the ordinary kind of losing someone. It was never built to survive six eternities landing on it in a single night, on top of being the last thing left standing. I don’t think anything could have stayed whole through that. She didn’t break so much as she simply had nowhere left to stand.” She looked at the garden as if seeing a different world. “After that, it was a matter of time. I stood alone at the gates for a century or two, but in the end, Hecate couldn’t survive being the last of her kind. She was never meant to hold that much. And she was never meant to hold it alone.”

Andy looked at her, trying to read the weight of that loss.

Arabella let the silence stretch, her eyes tracking the invisible maps between the garden paths. “Every self I have ever shed has ended on a grief. Maybe that’s just what I am: built by love, undone by loss, put back together again for the next story.” She gave Andy a gentle look, the light in her eyes refracted, not dimmed.

He could have said something then—maybe that it was a beautiful way to be, maybe that loss and love were just different sides of the same crossing. But he didn’t. He just sat with her, letting the unfinished stories breathe in the gold-bright air.

Samson Drei stood, shook himself, and padded over, resting his heavy head on Andy’s knee.

Arabella laughed, and the sound was the lightest thing in the garden all morning.

When the last of the dew had burned off the leaves and the air shimmered with the promise of heat, she said, “We should go back soon. But it’s nice to sit here a while longer.”

Andy said, “It is.”

They stayed, side by side, until the lines of the paths lost their edge and the world outside the garden felt very far away.