The Plant Sitter

The note on Daniel's door said: "Going to my sister's for 2 weeks. Please water the plant on my balcony. The key is with the watchman. You seem responsible. — 4C."

Daniel had never spoken to 4C. He knew her only as a bright yellow raincoat in the lift and a laugh he could sometimes hear through the wall, and he had no idea what he'd done to seem responsible. But he took the key, and went in, and found the plant.

It was dead. Not dying — dead. Historically dead. A brown stick in a red pot with a name written on the pot in marker: Gerald.

He watered a stick named Gerald for two weeks because those were his instructions.

Then, because the whole thing kept bothering him, he did something slightly insane: he went to the nursery, matched the pot, and planted a young money plant beside the stick — not replacing Gerald, just keeping him company. He left his own note when she returned: "Watered daily. Gerald is beyond my skills. He has a roommate now. I'm sorry if this was overstepping. — 4B."

The reply came under his door that night. "4B. Gerald has been dead for two years. He belonged to someone I don't talk about anymore, and I couldn't throw him out, and I couldn't look at him either. Asking a stranger to water him was possibly a cry for help. The roommate made me cry in a good way. What's his name? — 4C."

Daniel slid his answer back the same hour: "You get to name him. That's the rule with plants and other things that are starting over."

She named the money plant Chance. Of course she did.

What happened next took a year, and it happened one balcony at a time: cuttings exchanged over the railing, then cups of tea, then the yellow raincoat hanging — once, accidentally, then not accidentally — on his side of the wall. Chance grew the way money plants grow, which is to say ridiculously, until his vines crossed from her balcony to his and had to be trained along the divider with tape, a green sentence written between two flats.

Gerald stayed in the red pot, in the middle, dead as ever. They kept him. Some things you water not because they'll grow, but because of what grew around them while you weren't looking.

More sweet short love stories

If you like a slow, gentle build with a soft landing, these are the same flavour:

• The Wrong Number — a texting love story that starts by mistake
• The Crossword War — an enemies-to-lovers story over one newspaper puzzle
• Slow-burn stories — the whole trope, free to read