Summer came. London bloomed in parks and window boxes. I rented a small cottage for a week in Kent and read three novels in a garden full of lavender. I laughed more. I worked hard. My team’s trial data hit a milestone that put my name on a publication I would once have sent to my mother in the hope of praise. Instead I took myself to dinner and ordered dessert.
On the anniversary of the night everything broke, I did something quiet.
I went to Columbia Road Flower Market and bought a climbing rose called Peace. I carried it back through the city on the train, dirt under my nails by the time I reached home, and planted it in a long terracotta container on the balcony. Not because I forgave anyone. Not because peace is passive. Because peace, I had finally learned, can be built like any other structure: with money saved, distances chosen, locks changed, numbers blocked, and the deliberate refusal to volunteer your softness to people who treat it like inventory.
Sometimes I still dreamed of Oak Street.