Cleo had grown up knowing the Latin names of plants before she knew the common ones.
Her mother was a botanist. The house was full of specimens, pressing papers, notebooks, and the faint smell of soil and formaldehyde. Dinner conversations were about photosynthesis, seed dispersal, mycorrhizal networks.
Cleo was twelve before she stopped and actually looked at a flower.
She was in the garden, waiting for her mother to finish a call, and there was a foxglove at eye level. Purple bells, spotted dark inside, hanging in a column. She looked at it — really looked, the way her mother looked at specimens.
The structure was extraordinary. Each bell was a perfect geometric form. The spots were positioned precisely where a pollinator would land. The whole thing was an argument, in the form of a flower, for the existence of bees.
Cleo had known all this. She had known it for years.
But she had known it the way you know something in a textbook. Not the way you know something when you're standing in front of it in the afternoon light with the smell of the garden around you and the foxglove right there.
Her mother came out and found her staring.
"Sorry," said Cleo. "I was looking at the foxglove."
Her mother looked at it too.
"I know," she said. "You can know something for twenty years and still one day it just—" she paused. "Becomes real."
Cleo nodded. She looked at the foxglove for another minute.
Then she went inside and looked up the Latin name she'd known since she was eight, to see if it meant anything different now.
It did.