The Inbox

The clock read 10:47 when Claire Matsuda opened her laptop. A stack of spelling tests teetered beside her elbow, red pen marks bleeding through the top sheet. Her coffee had gone cold two hours ago, but she lifted the mug anyway and grimaced at the bitter film on her tongue.

Forty-seven subscribers.

The number sat in the corner of her email dashboard like a quiet judgment. Not forty-eight. Not fifty. She knew who most of them were. Her sister. Two colleagues from school. The woman from the farmers market who'd asked about blight resistance last summer. Ann Posey in eastern Oregon, subscriber twelve. Marcus Chen in Portland, subscriber nineteen. The retired couple in Spokane growing tomatoes in their greenhouse.

She pulled up last week's newsletter. Subject line: Why Your Cherokee Purples Split (And What To Do About It). Open rate: sixty-eight percent. She'd written it at this same table after midnight, soil still under her fingernails from photographing her garden in the fading light.

Dear friends,

She always started that way. Not Hey gardeners or Tomato lovers. Friends. Because that's what it felt like when she wrote — like she was sitting across from someone who actually cared whether their Brandywines developed bottom rot.

The bedroom door creaked open upstairs. Claire froze, listening. Footsteps crossed the hallway — Brendan, probably checking on the kids. The bathroom faucet ran, then silence.

Her cursor blinked in the empty compose window.

This week's topic: saving seeds from hybrid versus heirloom varieties. She'd been planning it for days. She'd taken photos of her seed-drying setup, the small labeled envelopes arranged by variety and harvest date. But now, staring at the blank screen, the words felt stuck somewhere between her brain and her fingers.

"Still up?"

Brendan stood in the doorway, barefoot, wearing the faded Seahawks shirt he'd owned since college. His hair stuck up on one side.