"You paid her," Norah whispered.
"Wish I'd thought of it."
After the opening, they drove back to the farm.
The lower pasture looked almost exactly as it had before 1989.
That remained the strangest thing.
Grass.
Fence.
Cattle.
Drainage swale.
No visible sign that a historic channel and buried timber cache had once sat beneath the surface waiting for floodwater to expose them.
Norah and Eli walked as far as the old fence post where the water had first deposited mud around their boots all those years earlier.
Eli moved slowly now.
Norah matched his pace.
They stopped where Log 1 remained partly underground.
The location was recorded on surveys and protected from accidental excavation, but no monument marked it. Eli preferred that.
"Think it's still sound?" Norah asked.
"Maybe."
She laughed.
"I walked into that one."
"Finally learned something."
They stood quietly.
The river itself was miles away in its modern channel.
Birds moved through the grass.
A cow pulled at weeds near the fence.
Nothing about the afternoon looked historic.
Norah thought about how close the farm had come to losing the timber for almost nothing.
Not because Eli was careless.
Because the logs had arrived disguised as a problem at exactly the moment the family had more urgent problems to solve.
That was what she remembered most clearly.
Value had not looked valuable.
It had looked black, waterlogged, inconvenient, heavy, and expensive to remove.
The flood had ruined hay and fence and road.
Why would anybody expect it to leave a gift mixed into the damage?
But even gift was the wrong word.
The timber had been there long before the flood.
The flood only stripped away enough earth for the Bells to notice.
Norah finally understood the distinction that had taken her years to put into language.
The disaster did not create the opportunity.
It revealed it.
And Marcus Sterling, for all the frustration he caused, had accidentally taught her another part of the lesson. People reveal information through what they want. His first trip, his attention to three trunks, his rising offers, and his reluctance to describe what he suspected had all been data long before Norah knew to call it that.
The mark mattered.
The maps mattered.
The wood mattered.
So did behavior.
"Granddad?"
"Hmm?"
"If Marcus had offered twelve thousand the first morning, would you have sold?"