Chloe in Willowmere

His name was Gerald. Gerald Hooper, Willowmere Heights Development, arrived at the garden gate on a mild Tuesday morning in a suit that had last fit him comfortably sometime around 2019. He had a stack of glossy brochures and a practiced smile and fully expected the whole thing to go smoothly. What he found instead was Chloe, and Mr. Chen, and a handful of neighbors who had been tending these beds for longer than some of Gerald's office furniture had been in production. They didn't shout. They didn't need to. Mr. Chen kept examining a tomato plant while Gerald trailed off mid-sentence. The brochures grew heavy in his hand. Standing alone on the gravel path a few minutes later, looking out over the weathered potting shed and the worn wooden benches and the rows of things that had been planted and harvested and planted again for over seventy years, Gerald felt something he genuinely had not budgeted for: the weight of what he was proposing to end.