Elise considered. “Not of touching. Just of being dropped.”

On the autumn equinox they held a small gathering: soup brewed from their own herbs, bread baked with garden rosemary. Someone produced a cheap cassette player; Vanda taught them to two-step on the cracked concrete, arms linked, shoulders relaxed. Elise, laughing, realized she’d spoken more words in three hours than in the past three months.

Their first task was to revive a knot garden—an intricate pattern of herbs meant to be both beautiful and medicinal. The shelter’s residents had walked away from it years earlier, leaving thyme to strangle rosemary and lavender gone woody and sour.

“Plants are like people,” Vanda said, kneeling to inspect a brutalized sage. “Hold ’em too tight, they forget how to stand.”

Later, sweeping thyme clippings into a compost bucket, Vanda asked, “Still afraid of touching?”