I Paid $1.6 Million for a Kentucky Farmhouse. Every Morning at Six, a Stranger Let Herself Into My Garden

She was sitting on the stone bench in the middle of the roses, in a cardigan over her nightgown, with the moon on her white hair.

I walked out slowly so I wouldn’t scare her.

“Mrs. Larkin?”

She looked up and smiled like I was expected.

“Oh, good,” she said. “You must be the new gardener’s boy. The Pink Peace needs deadheading. Delphine Larkin. Sit down, sit down.”

I sat down.

She’d walked out of the memory care building when the night door was propped open for a delivery. A cab driver had picked her up on the road and brought her to the address she gave him. This one. The only one she remembered.

I called the nurse back to say she was safe. Then I called Ivy.

While we waited, Delphine told me about every rose in that garden. Their names. The year she planted each one. Which one her husband had bought her when their daughter was born.

She remembered all of it. Every word.

Ivy’s car came up the drive twenty minutes later, too fast. She ran into the garden in her pajamas and a coat and dropped to her knees beside her mother.

“Mama.”

“Ivy, honey. This nice young man is going to help with the roses.”

Ivy looked up at me over her mother’s head. Her eyes were wet.

We stayed out there until almost one in the morning, the three of us, until Delphine got sleepy and Ivy drove her back.

The next morning at six, Ivy came through the gate as usual.

I was already in the garden, deadheading the Pink Peace.

She stood there for a long moment.

“I signed with a real estate agent yesterday,” she said quietly. “I’m selling the garden. The memory care is eleven thousand dollars a month, and I can’t keep up.”