Dad, Please Come Get Me

The garden behind Daniel’s house had not been a garden for years.

It was a rectangle of stubborn soil bordered by rotting wood, filled with weeds, old mulch, and the ghosts of Caroline’s tomatoes. After his wife died, Daniel had kept the lawn trimmed but let the garden go. At first because he was grieving. Later because bringing it back felt like admitting time had continued without asking permission.

Emma stood beside it on a mild Saturday morning wearing jeans, a gray sweatshirt, and sunglasses too large for her face.

“This is tragic,” she said.

Daniel looked at the weed bed.

“Operationally neglected.”

“Dad.”

“Fine. Tragic.”

She laughed.

Small but real.

That was how the garden began.

Not as therapy, though both of them knew it was. Not as a project, though Daniel bought too many tools and printed soil guides like he was planning a campaign. It began because Emma had said she did not want her life to be only evidence, and Daniel had finally learned that when his daughter named a need, his job was not to strategize over it.

His job was to stand beside it.

They worked in short stretches.

Emma could not kneel long because healing ribs pulled when she bent. Daniel moved slowly because his back had opinions from twenty-nine years of service and ten years of pretending age was a rumor. They cleared weeds into brown paper bags. They pulled the old wood border apart. They found a rusted trowel Caroline had once painted blue so no one would lose it.

Emma held it in both hands.

“Mom used this?”

“Constantly.”

“She tried to make me like tomatoes.”

“You called them wet apples.”

“They are wet apples.”

Daniel smiled despite himself.

For a while, the past sat with them gently.

No Prescott name.

No court date.

No medical record.

Just Caroline’s trowel, dirt under Emma’s nails, and sun moving across the back fence.

Halfway through the afternoon, a car slowed in front of the house.

Daniel noticed before Emma did.

Old habit.

A black sedan rolled past, turned at the corner, then disappeared.

Emma’s shoulders tightened.

Daniel placed one hand on the porch railing.

“You recognize it?”

“No.”

“Andrew’s people?”

“I don’t know.”

Her breathing changed.

Not much.

Enough.

Daniel went inside and called the advocate, then the state investigator. He gave the plate number because he had memorized it without thinking. By evening, they learned the car belonged to a private investigator hired by Margaret Prescott’s civil attorney.

The purpose, according to the attorney, was “background verification.”

The investigator had photographed Daniel’s house.

Emma in the garden.

Daniel beside her.

Caroline’s old trowel on the ground.

Miriam filed a motion the next morning.

The judge did not appreciate surveillance of a protected party at her father’s residence.

Margaret’s attorney called it routine.

The judge called it intimidation-adjacent.

Daniel liked that phrase.

Emma liked it more.

“Intimidation-adjacent sounds like something rich people do when they’re too cowardly to threaten you directly.”

“That is an accurate civilian translation,” Daniel said.

The surveillance stopped.

The garden did not.

By June, they had planted tomatoes, basil, marigolds, and one stubborn row of carrots Emma insisted on trying because Caroline had once failed at carrots and sworn revenge.

When the first tomato ripened, Emma picked it and held it up like evidence of a different kind.

“Still a wet apple,” she said.

Then she took a bite.