Eli arrived with the watering can, stopped when he saw her expression, and set it down. "We lost some?" he asked.
"More than we should have." She lifted her hands from the dirt. "I tried to make the plot happen before the ground was ready."
He looked at the surviving plants, then at the blank spaces between them. "Does that mean the seed's no good?"
"It means I did a poor job setting up the test. If I mix my mistakes into the results, I won't know what the seed was capable of in the first place." She reached for the notebook and wrote down the soil condition, planting date, weather, and losses in detail. "We're not going to pretend this didn't happen."
At the kitchen table that evening, Eli asked whether she was going to tell Marianne about the rushed preparation. Callie almost answered defensively, then stopped. He was not trying to embarrass her; he was asking whether the rules they had agreed to still applied when telling the truth made his sister look bad. She picked up the phone and left a message describing the trial honestly.
Marianne called back the next morning. She listened, asked which seedlings were still viable, and suggested that Callie separate the surviving plants from any later controlled comparison rather than allowing the early mistake to contaminate every result. She reminded Callie that a trial could fail for reasons entirely unrelated to the variety, and that recognizing those reasons was itself useful information. Then she gave her the name of a grower who had experience multiplying small quantities of unusual open-pollinated seed.
That grower, Arthur Quinn, lived two counties away and ran an operation smaller than Hollow Bend. He had been preserving local vegetable and grain varieties for years and was suspicious of anybody who talked about miracle crops. When Callie described the find, he asked whether she had chain-of-custody records, photographs of the original labels, and a place where the surviving plants could be protected from cross-pollination. Her answers were not perfect, but they were detailed enough to make him interested.
"You need patience more than optimism," he told her over the phone. "A few living plants can be the beginning of a seed increase, but they can also vanish in one bad afternoon. Don't build your family's mortgage payment around them."
"I already know better than that," she said.
"Good. Then you might be the person who can keep them going."
Meanwhile, the bank was still sending letters. A storm removed shingles from the barn roof, and the repair estimate was more than Callie had managed to save from her outside jobs. Dutch offered to take another reduction in pay. She refused, and their argument lasted long enough that Eli came out to find out whether one of the cattle had escaped.
"You can't keep paying people with loyalty," Callie told Dutch. "You've already given us more of that than I can repay."