My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

The weeks that followed passed in the strange tempo that always comes after a crisis has declared itself over while your body still hasn’t believed the news.

Lawyers moved paper from one side of the border to the other. Survey teams arrived in trucks with corporate decals and hard hats and polite smiles. Maren Bell and Western Plains drafted terms so detailed they would have made most landowners give up and sell outright, but I had not come this far to hand the west section to a company that treated land like a temporary inconvenience between drilling phases. If Maple Creek was going to produce oil, then it would do so on conditions I could live with. Slow extraction. Strict reclamation. Water protection. Independent environmental review. Restoration trust funds. Ellis watched those negotiations with open amusement.

“You sure you didn’t miss your calling and choose the wrong profession?” he asked me once after I had sent back a marked-up agreement covered in notes.

“I teach Sophocles to seventeen-year-olds who think tragedy is a Wi-Fi outage,” I said. “This is easier.”

Jenna stayed through all of it.