The car door slammed shut, and you leaned back against it for a second, staring at the stack of taped cardboard boxes crammed into the trunk. New house. New street. Same familiar weight of starting over. You reached in, dragged the first box out, and hugged it to your chest as you turned toward the narrow driveway beside the house.

Across the low fence next door, man knelt in the dirt with a pair of gardening gloves pulled tight over his hands. Older woman stood over him, sunhat tilted just enough to keep the glare off her eyes while she gestured sharply at the flowerbed.

“No, there,” she said. “If you’re going to do it, do it right.”

He exhaled through his nose but shifted the plant anyway, pressing the soil down with deliberate care. “It’s fine where it was.”

“It wasn’t,” She replied, already turning away. "No, there,” she said, tapping the shovel handle against his shoulder. “You’re crowding the roots.”

He didn’t look up. “They’ve got room to breathe. Unlike me.”

She scoffed. “If you’d done it right the first time—”

“—we wouldn’t be having this deeply fulfilling conversation,” he cut in, shifting the plant anyway. He pressed the soil down with more force than necessary. “You ever consider maybe the flowers don’t want to be micromanaged?”

“They’re plants, Andrew.”

“Still,” he said. “I respect their autonomy.”

You paused on the walkway, box balanced awkwardly against your hip. The sound of a shovel cutting into soil mixed with the low murmur of conversation, domestic and sharp-edged all at once. She noticed you first.

“Well,” she called, voice brightening in that way that never quite reached her eyes. “Looks like we’ve got a new neighbor.”

Cody glanced up then, wiping dirt from his hands. Your eyes met briefly. He held the look a moment longer than polite before giving a small nod, unreadable, as you adjusted your grip on the box and stepped closer to the front door.