Haewon found them on a Tuesday morning.
She came in from the garden with her notebook and dirt on her coat and the particular expression she wore when something had confirmed a prediction she had been carefully tracking. She did not shout. She simply found Wei Zhengnan and me at the breakfast table and put her notebook down in front of us, open to a page that read, in her neat hand: Estimated bloom: late winter, third week. Actual bloom: late winter, third week.
"They're up," she said.
We went to see.
They were modest things — green shoots no taller than my finger, pushing up through the soil in the section Old Sim had prepared in the deepest cold. They were not yet blooming. They were just present, insistently green, evidence of something that had been growing underground for months without any visible sign that it was working.
