"Believed you'd seen something."
"That's not what I asked."
"No. I didn't know you were right."
"Did you think I was wrong?"
"Didn't know that either."
She looked at him. "How did you live sixty-eight years with so many unanswered questions?"
"By not expecting the world to explain itself on my schedule."
Norah kicked lightly at the grass.
"I thought finding the mark was the important part."
"It was important."
"But anybody could have seen it."
"Did they?"
She looked toward the shed where recovered lumber remained stacked.
Marcus had seen it.
He understood its possibility.
The neighbors saw only black logs.
Eli saw a cleanup problem.
Norah had recognized the mark but not its meaning.
"No," she said.
Eli rested one hand on her shoulder.
"Knowing an answer helps. Knowing when something deserves another question helps longer."
Norah thought about the first offer.
Almost nothing to haul the pile away.
Then five hundred.
Fifteen hundred.
Three thousand.
Five.
Eight.
Twelve thousand for the best three.
The changing numbers had not changed the wood.
They had changed only how much other people revealed about what they believed.
"Marcus knew enough to ask the wrong question for us," she said.
Eli smiled. "Meaning?"
"He asked what we'd take before we knew what we had."
"That's business."
"Our job was to know what we had first."
"That's also business."
The sun lowered behind the cottonwoods.
Light spread gold across the recovered pasture.
Norah could almost imagine the old west chute filled with water, enormous cypress sticks drifting around the bend under men shouting from boats and banks. She could imagine some logs escaping the boom in 1891, sliding into a secondary current, lodging in mud, sinking, disappearing beneath sediment as seasons and generations passed above them.
She knew imagination was not proof.
That no longer made imagination useless.
It simply meant she had learned where to place it.
A starting point.
Not a conclusion.
The summer after the flood, Norah stopped checking the pasture because she expected another discovery. She checked it because observation had become habit. On evenings when the day's heat loosened its grip, she walked the fence line with a notebook tucked into the back of her jeans, sometimes recording water levels or erosion and sometimes writing nothing at all.
The old channel remained easiest to see at those hours. Light fell sideways across the field and revealed slight changes in elevation the midday sun flattened. Grass grew thicker in one curve. Soil stayed darker after rain. A line of volunteer willows appeared near the lowest section until Eli cut them before roots could complicate drainage.