Before Marc ever set foot in the Garden of Beauty, Ira was already there.
But not as an artist. Not as a girl who dreamed of sketching or painting.
She came to the garden for a much simpler, almost desperate reason: to breathe.
The hospital was cold, white, and sterile, a place where clocks ticked louder than heartbeats and where the walls seemed to steal hope with every echo of the doctor's shoes. Ira hated it there. At seventeen, she wanted to feel alive, not trapped in endless consultations, diagnoses, and promises of "management."
That was the year she was diagnosed.
An incurable autoimmune disease. One the doctors dressed up with clinical words: manageable, chronic, progressive. But behind closed doors, when her parents stepped out of the room, Ira overheard the words that cut deeper: degenerative. irreversible. eventually disabling.
Her body would slowly betray her. Her strength would fade. Her energy would collapse. One day, maybe, even her memory. The thought terrified her, but even more, it exhausted her.
So she stopped telling people.
She stopped telling her friends why she missed birthdays, why she skipped trips, why she canceled plans last minute. She let them think she was aloof, busy, unreliable. It was easier than saying, "My body doesn't work like yours does."
And when Marc came into her life, she made the hardest choice of all. She never told him either.
Because Marc looked at her like she was a beginning, not an ending. He saw her as the girl who made the world more beautiful just by noticing it. And for once, she didn't want to be the sick girl, the fragile girl, the girl people whispered about in pity.
She wanted to be someone who gave life meaning, not someone who was running out of it.
So she gave Marc the only thing she could.
Her garden.
Her thoughts.
Her quiet way of seeing the world.
And she gave them freely, without expectation.
When Marc left, when he walked away clutching his sketchpad full of drawings that wouldn't have existed without her eyes, Ira felt something she couldn't name.
She cried that night. Not because she was heartbroken, but because she felt full and empty all at once. She had given him everything she could, and in return, he gave her the gift of being seen, truly seen, for who she was, not what she carried.
And then, silence.
The years that followed blurred together. There were good days, when she could walk through the garden and almost forget the word disease even existed. And there were dark days, when she couldn't get out of bed, when her legs trembled after just a few steps, when the medication made her feel like a hollow shell of herself.
But there was one thing that kept pulling her back to the world outside of illness.
Marc's letters.
They didn't come often. Sometimes weeks, even months, would pass between them. But when they arrived, they carried more than ink. Sometimes it was a postcard from a city she'd only ever read about. Sometimes a photograph. Most often, it was a sketch.
A café corner in Paris. A streetlamp in Berlin. A quiet park in Florence.
He didn't know it, but every drawing was a lifeline. A thread pulling her back to the garden, back to the girl she had been when they sat beneath the old tree.
One night, while staring at a sketch of a rainy street in Rome, Ira did something she had never done before. She picked up a pencil.
Not to impress anyone. Not to become an artist. But simply to feel closer to him.
Her first drawing was clumsy. The lines shook. The shading was patchy. Her proportions were wrong. But she didn't stop. Because the act of trying made her feel alive. With every pencil stroke, she remembered the way Marc's hand used to glide across paper, the way he would pause, tilt his head, and truly see.
For the first time in years, Ira felt like she was not just waiting for life to happen, she was part of it.
By year seven, she had taught herself from old art books and free tutorials online. She studied quietly, sometimes late into the night when the world was asleep. It wasn't about skill. It was about belonging, about touching the part of herself that illness couldn't steal.
By year nine, she was sketching in the garden itself. Not as a master. Not even as a confident student. But as someone who wanted to see again. She sat under the old tree, her lines still imperfect, but her heart steady.
By year ten, she had built something more permanent.
Near the edge of town, there was an abandoned shed. Broken windows. Dusty walls. Forgotten. She cleaned it out herself, trip by trip, even when her body protested. She painted the windows with soft blues. She hung shelves she found in thrift shops. She pinned Marc's very first postcard to the wall, the one from Paris, and beneath it she scrawled the words: Keep trying.
She called it The Leaf Studio
Not because she was chasing him, or his memory. But because, in her own way, she had grown roots. The leaf that once inspired Marc to see the world differently had also taught Ira how to stay, how to hold on, how to find meaning in fragility.
The studio became a sanctuary. Children wandered in sometimes, curious. She taught them not how to draw, but how to look, to notice the veins on a leaf, the cracks in a stone, the colors hidden in shadows. She wasn't their teacher, not really. She was just someone who reminded them that beauty could be found even in the overlooked.
And when Marc finally returned, stepping back into the garden after ten years, he found her under the tree.
She wasn't the same girl he had left. She was a woman now, with softer lines in her face, with eyes that had seen pain and still chosen to love the world anyway. She was sketching, the pencil steady in her hand, the pages filled not with perfection but with presence.
She smiled at him.
Not as the girl who once watched him draw.
But as the woman who had found her own voice in the silence he left behind.
And still, she hadn't told him.
Not yet.
Because she wanted him to see her as she was, not as a patient, not as fragile, but as someone whole.
But soon.
Because if there was one thing she had learned in those ten years, it was this: even the most fragile things, like a single falling leaf, could still teach someone how to fly.