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Every spring, without fail, the boy asked his grandmother the same question.

“Grandma, will it come back?”

He was six when he asked it first. He had stood at her garden gate on a cold March morning, looking at the bare rose bush that grew against the back wall — a sprawling, thorny, apparently lifeless thing that she had been growing since before his father was born — and he had looked at it for a long time with the specific solemnity of a child confronting something they do not understand but sense is important.

“Will it come back?”

His grandmother had crouched down beside him, which she could still do then, and looked at the rose with the same serious attention she gave everything he asked her about.

“It always has,” she said. “So I expect it will again.”

He was eight when he asked it the second time. The winter had been a long one, and the rose had looked, by February, genuinely finished — several of the main branches split, the whole thing smaller and more diminished than he remembered. He had felt a particular anxiety about it through March, checking it on the Saturdays he came to visit with the dedication of someone monitoring a patient.

“Grandma. Will it come back?”