Chapter Six : The Garden
814 Words
She discovered the garden that arvo. Not because she was searching for it — or at least that was what she told herself as she slipped out the side door of the estate and followed the stone path around the east wing until the immaculate hedges gave way to something wilder, and the air shifted from cold and controlled to something that smelled like earth, old roses, and rain. It was larger than it appeared from her window. A wrought iron gate marked the entrance — black, tall, unlocked. It swung open easily when she pushed it, as if it had been waiting Inside, the garden stretched in all directions, untamed and overgrown, making it seem less like neglect and more like abandonment — like something that was loved very deliberately and then left very deliberately. Rosebushes grew wild. Stone paths were barely visible beneath layers of creeping green. A stone bench near the centre, moss-covered but still standing. And in the far corner — a small fountain, dry and still, with leaves gathered in the basin like the garden had been tucking them in away for safekeeping.
Sienna moved slowly through the garden. She brushed a rosebush gently as she passed. Overgrown, yes. But alive. Still blooming in small, stubborn flashes of deep red despite everything — despite the years, neglect, and nobody showing up. Stubborn, she thought. Good. She sat on the stone bench in the middle, looked around, and felt — for the first time since the car pulled away from her father's place — something close to peace. Her phone buzzed. Nora: Status report. How’s the devil today? Sienna smiled. Sienna: Quiet. He had me investigated before the wedding. Nora: WHAT. Sienna: He knew about my degree, my job, you. Nora: He knows about ME? I don't know whether to be flattered or terrified. Sienna: Be both.
Nora: Are you okay with that? Him knowing everything?
Sienna looked around at the garden. At the stubborn red roses and the dry fountain and the stone path disappearing into green.
Sienna: He said it wasn't a weapon. Just due diligence.
Nora: And you believed him?
Sienna thought about his hand going still around his coffee cup. About the one beat of silence that lasted too long.
Sienna: I don't know yet.
Nora: Be careful Si. Please.
Sienna: Always.
She put the phone away and sat quietly in the garden for a while longer.
She didn't hear him arrive.
One moment she was alone and the next — she wasn't.
She felt it before she saw it. That particular shift in the air that she was already, after less than twenty-four hours, beginning to associate with him. She turned her head.
Damien stood at the garden gate.
He wasn't looking at the garden. He was looking at her — standing perfectly still with one hand resting on the iron gate, his grey eyes moving over the scene in front of him with an expression she couldn't fully read.
Something in it was careful. Guarded. Like a man approaching something he wasn't sure was safe.
"I didn't think anyone came here," he said.
His voice was even. But quieter than usual.
"No one told me not to," Sienna said. "You only mentioned the third floor."
Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not quite a smile. Not quite not one either.
He stepped through the gate.
He didn't sit on the bench beside her. He stood a few feet away, hands in his pockets, looking at the rosebushes with an expression that had nothing to do with roses.
"It was my mother's," he said.
He said it the way you say something you didn't plan to say. Quietly. Without looking at her.
Sienna went very still.
It belonged to no one, he had said at breakfast.
She didn't remind him of that.
"It's beautiful," she said softly. "Even like this."
He said nothing for a moment.
"She planted everything herself," he said. "Every rosebush. Every path."
"How long has it been since anyone tended it?" Sienna asked gently.
The silence stretched between them warm and careful.
"Twelve years," he said.
Sienna looked at the stubborn red roses still blooming despite everything.
"She would be glad they survived," she said quietly.
Damien turned to look at her then — fully, directly — and for just a moment his grey eyes were not careful or guarded or unreadable.
They were simply —
Human.
He looked away before she could say anything else.
"Don't stay out too long," he said, his voice back to its usual evenness. "It gets cold quickly out here."
He walked back through the gate.
Sienna watched him go.
Her heart was doing that thing again — the thing she kept refusing to name.
She looked back at the red roses.
Twelve years, she thought.
He remembered every single one of them.
- Writer
