LENA

The roses required attention.

I want to be precise about this because there is a version of the evening that positions me on the terrace as a woman who had arranged herself in proximity to a thing she knew Julian Voss would eventually come home to, and that version is not accurate, is not the specific and honest accounting of a woman who had finished the afternoon's foundation work at four-thirty and had come to the terrace at four forty-five because the roses required attention and she had the time.

They required attention.

The second cutting on the left side of the trellis had been pulling away from the...