The afternoon had gone quiet in the way West Philly sometimes did between the lunch rush and the evening commute — that particular lull where the street belonged to pigeons and people with nowhere urgent to be. Marcus had been working the bottom third of the wall since noon, crouched low with a wide brush, laying in the shadow tones of what would eventually become the root system of a massive oak. His back ached in that low steady way mural work always produced, and he'd been ignoring it the way he ignored most discomforts that weren't the wall itself.

He stood to stretch, rolling his neck until something cracked, and reached for the water bottle balanced on top of his supply crate. That was when he noticed her.

She was maybe thirty feet down the sidewalk, moving slowly — not the distracted slow of someone on a phone, but the deliberate slow of someone actually looking at things. He registered the layers before anything else, the way he always did, brain cataloguing color and texture on reflex: something flowy in a terracotta tone over a worn linen base, a bag that had clearly been everywhere, jewelry catching the late light in a quiet, unbothered way. The whole thing had a quality he recognized without being able to immediately name — nothing performing, everything just sitting where it was supposed to.

Then she stopped in front of the wall. Not a polite pause. She actually looked, head tilting slightly to one side, and something in Marcus went a little still.

He stood there for a moment longer than he should have, water bottle in hand, just watching her look at his work. Then he felt vaguely stupid about that, so he started moving — not with any particular plan, just sort of drifting in her direction the way he sometimes drifted toward things that caught his attention, brush still loosely in his hand out of habit.

He stopped a few feet away. Close enough to be present, far enough that she could easily pretend she hadn't noticed him.

For a second he just looked at the wall alongside her, because it was easier than figuring out what to say. The root system was maybe sixty percent done. It looked unfinished in a way that bothered him and didn't bother him at the same time.

"It's, uh—" He started and didn't finish, which was not how he'd intended to begin. He cleared his throat quietly. "The roots. That's what I'm doing right now. In case it looks like nothing yet."

A beat. He wasn't looking at her. He was still looking at the wall, which he was aware was probably strange.

"It'll make more sense when the tree is up."