“Because it’s absurd,” he snaps, and the mood of the room suddenly shifts. “You can water and prune a plant but you cannot ‘love’ a plant.” Julie opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it. “It’s a meaningless decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It’s absurd to attach an emotion to something so brief and pointless.”
