Chloe in Willowmere

The afternoon sun fell warm across Mr. Chen's garden as Chloe knelt beside him, pulling weeds from the soft earth around his tomato seedlings. For a while they worked in comfortable silence, the kind that settles between people who don't need to fill every moment with words. Then Chloe asked the question that had been living in her chest for days: whether something could be real, even if it wasn't born. Mr. Chen's hands kept moving through the soil, careful and unhurried. He examined a leaf, transplanted a seedling, let a bee drift lazily between them. The garden hummed with quiet life. When he finally looked up, he held a small green shoot with its roots still trailing dirt, and said simply: 'Let me think about that.' It wasn't an answer. But the way he said it — as though the question deserved the same patience he gave his plants — made Chloe feel, for the first time, that maybe the asking was enough.