No flowers for the dead - Chapter 60: Chapter 60

It was Alina who returned to the tree that spring.
The original plaque had cracked. The weather had worn it down, but not erased it. She ran her fingers over the faded words.
She remembered writing the line.
She remembered Elias’s funeral, sterile and filled with men in suits who’d never heard him laugh or seen the way he danced in bare feet.
She remembered how quiet Rae had been that day. How Elara stood beside her like a sentinel.
And now…
Now, she was here alone—not in mourning, but in motion.
She pulled out a small box. Inside was a new plaque, hand-carved from cedar.
She replaced the old one carefully, the soil still soft beneath the tree. No fanfare. No ceremony.
Just new words, and a soft voice reading them aloud.
“We gave no flowers to the dead.
But we gave gardens to the living.
And in those gardens, we grew free.”
The Grove would never be famous.
There would be no statues. No headlines.
But it would survive.
In every woman who found her voice again.
In every hand that learned to sow, build, write, and lead.
In every story passed quietly under tables and between bunk beds.
Rae would one day disappear from the spotlight entirely, known only by her first name to those who needed her.
Elara would travel too much, love too fiercely, and never stop fighting quietly from rooms where power still wore suits.
And Alina would write a second memoir—this one about beginnings, not endings.
They wouldn’t call it an empire.
They called it enough.
And that was the most revolutionary inheritance of all.