I turned toward Ray.
“Do you know what I think about when I see this garden now?”
“What?”
“I think about how many people spent fifteen years talking about your worst mistake while you spent those years building something that could help them.”
He lowered his eyes.
“Don’t make me sound better than I am.”
“I’m not.”
I gestured toward the house.
“You made mistakes. You hurt people. But you didn’t spend the rest of your life pretending those mistakes were somebody else’s fault. You came home, accepted that people might never forgive you, and started doing what you could.”
Ray was quiet.
Then he placed another seed into the soil.
“That’s all any of us can do,” he said.
That afternoon, I walked back to the shed and picked up the brass key.
It no longer felt like the key to a hidden room.
It felt like a reminder of everything I had learned.
