Agarwood, Unending

The air in the glass greenhouse was heavy with the damp scent of moss. Ye Du walked barefoot across the bluestone paving, his trouser legs rolled up to his knees, muddy spots speckling his calves. He was using bamboo tweezers to pick up rotting fern leaves when he suddenly heard the wisteria curtain rustling behind him.

"You're still soaking chinaberry leaves in water to treat aphids?"

The tips of the tweezers struck the glass cover with a clear chink. He had heard that voice thousands of times at his bedside. Now, mingled with the warm April breeze, it was like a ripe loquat falling into a deep pool. When Ye Du turned around, the agarwood beads on his wrist slid to the crook of his elbow. Seven years passed through his tea-brown eyes, but in the end, not a ripple stirred.

"And Miss Lin is still using orange-scented hand cream." He took off his rubber gloves, moss embedded beneath his nails. "The greenhouse humidity is at 68 percent, just right for a blue hydrangea recovering from damage."

Lin Sui unconsciously rubbed the burn scar at the base of her thumb, left behind when she had boiled jasmine tea all those years ago. She watched the man crouch to tie a support frame around the mutated plant. Morning light slanted through the glass onto his back, turning his linen shirt almost transparent. Between the crooked branches of the blue hydrangea, a new bud was pushing through its malformed sepals.

"This one won't make it, will it?" Her voice sounded rough even to her own ears.

Ye Du's lashes cast a fence-like shadow on his cheek. As he turned his wrist, the agarwood beads clicked softly, like rain falling on bamboo leaves. "Twelve years ago, an earthquake in Yunnan snapped an ancient tea tree in half." He tied a loose knot with cotton thread. "Later, new shoots sprouted from the break. Now, every Qingming Festival, it yields three liang of snow buds."

A cross-breeze suddenly swept through the greenhouse, lifting the hanging trumpet vine into an emerald wave.