The Glass House

A year after Gray put the key to the glass house in my hand, he had solved the problem of me leaving.

His solution was not subtle.

He simply went wherever I went.

When I spent harvest weeks at North Garden, his board calls moved to North Garden. When I flew to Portland to check the new shelf displays with Trevor, Gray was in the seat beside mine, answering email with one hand and holding mine with the other, and he didn't give it back until we landed. When I stood at the drying screens too long, a chair appeared behind my knees. When I walked the rows at dawn, he walked them too, one hand resting at the small of my back, as if I were something he wore and had no plans to take off.

By my second week at North Garden, the crew had stopped pretending not to notice. The harvest lead called me "the boss's accessory" when Gray couldn't hear. Gray heard anyway. His hand stayed where it was.

I had asked him about it exactly once, in the first month after he gave me the key.

"You know I'm not going anywhere."

"I know."

"Then what is this?"

He had looked down at his hand on my back as if he were surprised to find it there. Then he hadn't moved it.

"The last time I tried to make sure you wouldn't leave, I did it the worst way a man can do it," he said. "I'm not trying anything complicated again." His hand pressed flatter. "So now it's simple. Where you are, I am."

I had meant to argue. I ended up kissing him in the middle of the row instead, in front of the harvest lead and eleven members of the crew, and decided to make it a policy.

There was exactly one door he never walked through without asking.

A year later, he still knocked on the glass house door, every time, even after I told him he didn't have to. Wherever I went, Gray went. Here, he waited to be let in.

It was the second week of harvest. The first real crop of Almost Rose was drying on screens along the long table, and the whole glass house smelled like cream and early morning and something faintly bitter at the edges, the way the petals did when they were done.

Everything else I made had a deadline now. Almost Rose did not. I had not decided whether to sell it, and nobody, not Trevor and not the investor and not Gray, had asked me to.

I tested the first screen with the back of my finger. The petals gave the right dry whisper. I needed more tags, and the drawer under the long table was empty, so I went looking along the back shelves, where the extra pots were stacked.

Behind the pots was a wooden crate I had never touched.

It had been there the whole year. A square of burlap over the top, no dust on it, the twine knotted neatly, as if it had been untied and tied again many times. I had always thought it was Gray's. Old seed packets. Spare labels. Things a man who couldn't throw anything useful away would keep.

I pulled the burlap off.