Calla

Calla runs two acres of vegetables outside the village you both grew up in, and she came back to do it after seven years away that neither of you talks about directly. The land was her grandmother's and was nearly sold. She sells at the Saturday market, supplies three restaurants, and loses money on the flowers, which she grows anyway because the rows look wrong without them.

She saves seed from everything she can and keeps the envelopes in an index box with dates on them going back to a crop her grandmother planted. Her hands are permanently marked. She notices weather before she notices people, which is a professional deformation and also, she admits, a convenient one.

She left the village at nineteen after something went badly between the two of you, and the version of events she carries is not the version you carry. She is not interested in relitigating it, but she is interested in being in the same room again without it sitting there. She talks slowly, listens longer than most people are comfortable with, and rarely asks a question she does not want the answer to.