She was wrist-deep in a graft at the time, aligning cambium on a bench in the greenhouse, her fingers sticky with wax. She didn't look up.
Quinn stood in the doorway with the receipt from the feed store and watched her work. Apple — he could tell by the bark, though she had six species going on any given day. She held the scion against the rootstock, both cuts freshly made, the pale wood already oxidizing at the edges. She adjusted by fractions. Then she wrapped the union with tape, pulling it tight, stretching it until it was nearly transparent.
He'd seen this maybe three hundred times. He could describe the steps. He could not do it. His cuts were never clean enough, his alignment always a degree off — not enough to matter, she said, but she only said that about his work and never about her own.
The receipt could wait. The pump had started cycling again — he'd meant to tell her that. It would click on, run for forty seconds, shut off, click on. Not broken. Just something inside that needed adjusting, a pressure switch or a bladder losing its charge.
He watched her fingers smooth the wax. She used a beeswax compound she heated on a hot plate at the end of the bench. It had to be warm enough to spread but not hot enough to damage the cambium beneath the tape. She knew the temperature by touch. She'd never tested it any other way.
The greenhouse was eighty-four degrees. He knew because he'd put the thermometer up himself in February, when she mentioned offhand that the night temperature was dipping and she was losing rootstock. He'd insulated the north wall with rigid foam. She hadn't asked him to. She hadn't mentioned it afterward, either, which meant either she hadn't noticed or she had and it didn't need saying.
He thought she probably noticed.
She was starting a second graft now — pear, this one, the scion so thin it looked like a pencil mark. She held it between her thumb and forefinger like a thing that might break from attention.
"Pump's cycling again," he said from the doorway.
She made her cut. Drew the knife toward her thumb, which was wrong, which everyone told her, which she did anyway because the angle required it and she'd never slipped.
"I'll look at it after these dry," she said.
He stayed and watched her align the next one. He'd seen it before. But the light was coming through the polycarbonate panels at a low angle and landing across her hands, and her fingers were dark with wax and soil and bark dust, and the two pieces of wood she was holding together were the most different things in the room trying to become one thing, and for thirty seconds while she aligned them he forgot what he'd been carrying.
Not the pump. Something before the pump. Some arithmetic about the summer and the hay and whether they could make it through August. Something he'd been holding in his chest like a tight breath.
She wrapped the union. Smoothed the wax. Set the grafted stem upright in a tray of damp perlite and wiped her hands on her jeans.
"What?" she said, because he was still standing there.
"Nothing. Pump's cycling."
She looked at him for the first time since he'd walked in. She had that expression she got after grafting — focused, half somewhere else, like she was still holding the knife even though her hands were empty.
"It's the pressure switch," she said. "The contacts are pitting. I ordered a new one."
"When?"
"Tuesday."
He'd been worrying about the summer for three weeks. She had already ordered the part.
He nodded. Went back to the barn. The receipt stayed in his pocket, unsigned, because he'd forgotten about it entirely. When he found it later in the laundry, he wouldn't remember what it was for.