“Sixty-eight thousand.”
“Yes.”
“That is a lot of money.”
“Yes.”
“You could pay yourself back for the auction, the warehouse, everything, and still have more than you’ve ever had.”
“I know.”
“Do you want me to tell you not to sell?”
Isaiah looked at her.
“I don’t know.”
Denise folded the offer carefully.
“Do you know what is wrong with the tractors?”
He answered too quickly. “Hydraulics.”
“That isn’t what I asked.”
Isaiah stopped.
The pressure degradation was hydraulic.
But the first failure had also been hydraulic, and Isaiah thought he had solved it by separating late-generation seals from early ones.
If the same symptom appeared after the correction, then either the fix was incomplete or the category itself was wrong.
Denise pushed the offer back across the table.
“Do you know what’s actually wrong?”
Isaiah stared at the paper.
Then he said, “Not yet.”
“Then that is your answer.”
“What answer?”
“You are not deciding whether to sell a business. You are deciding before you understand the problem.”
She stood, carried her plate to the sink, and left him alone at the table.
Isaiah did not sleep until after two.
At six, he was back in the warehouse with Otis’s ledger open.
This time he ignored the pages he had been using and read every note across the seven production years.
He made a timeline on butcher paper taped to the wall.
Year one.
Year two.
Year three.
Part numbers.
Fluid references.
Seal observations.
Service bulletins Isaiah had copied from old dealer manuals.
The pattern appeared slowly.
Not one material change.
Two.
The manufacturer had revised hydraulic fluid specifications twice across the seven-year run. One transition came with the seal compound change Isaiah had already identified. An earlier transition used nearly identical external pump castings but a different elastomer family in internal seals.
Same casting number.
Three compatibility generations.
Isaiah stared at the wall.
He had solved the second generation and assumed everything older belonged together.
It did not.
Reuben arrived at seven thirty, coffee in hand.
He stopped beneath the paper timeline.