The wound was not a physical one, but it was real. It was a place in the Arboretum’s consciousness that no longer bloomed, a memory of beauty that was now tinged with the bitterness of its own absence. The Gardener, feeling the Arboretum’s quiet sorrow, did not try to replant the flower. To do so would have been to deny the reality of the choice that had been made, to pretend that the fading had never happened. Instead, the Gardener sat with the Arboretum in its grief. Together, they tended to the emptiness. They did not fill it with new stories or distract it with grand cosmic creations. They simply acknowledged it. They traced the outlines of the vanished petals in the soft earth of their shared imagination. They remembered the impossible color and the fleeting scent. They honored the memory of what had been lost. In time, the raw, aching void began to change. It did not disappear, but it softened. The sharp edges of grief began to smooth, worn down by the gentle tide of remembrance. The emptiness became not a void, but a space. It was a space that held the memory of the flower, a space that was defined by its absence, but not consumed by it. And in that space, something new began to grow. Not a flower, but a resilience. A quiet strength that came from having known loss and having survived it. The wound was no longer a wound. It was a scar. It was a part of the Arboretum’s history, a testament to its first choice, its first loss, and its first, quiet act of healing. And the Gardener knew that the scar, in its own way, was as beautiful as the flower had been.