She also imagined walking into the seed cellar five years later and discovering that she needed written permission to do something with the very line her great-grandfather had protected. The thought settled beneath the attractive numbers and stayed there. She folded the offer, put it in a folder with the 1961 letter, and made herself wait until morning before responding.
At dawn she walked alone to the north plot. The corn had matured enough that its husks had begun to dry, and she could see hints of the copper and burgundy kernels through one split wrapper. The plants were beautiful in a way that had nothing to do with symmetry; they varied in height and ear shape, carrying the unevenness of a population selected over generations rather than a uniform commercial hybrid. They looked stubborn, imperfect, and very much alive.
She thought of the years her family had spent trying to prove that Hollow Bend was worth keeping. She thought of her father losing his life while trying to finish spring planting, her mother's grief, and Eli standing in a ruined pasture with a notebook because he had noticed the grass grew differently above something buried. None of those things appeared in Bragg's contract except in the word "source," which reduced a hundred years of family decisions to a legal definition.
By the time she returned to the house, she knew she would not sign the agreement as written. Knowing what she would not do, however, was different from knowing how to keep the farm alive without the money it offered. That was the part she needed help with, and for once she did not mistake asking for help as surrender.
Helen Carver spent most of two afternoons reviewing the draft. She marked it heavily, sometimes with technical comments and sometimes with a single question mark that required a conversation before Callie could understand the problem. The agreement did not contain an obvious trick that would make it easy to reject on principle; it was the kind of strong contract a sophisticated company drafted when it expected to gain valuable rights in exchange for assuming development risk. The danger lay in how thoroughly it answered future questions in Bragg's favor before anyone knew what those questions would be.
"The money is real," Helen told her. "So is the loss of control. We shouldn't pretend either one doesn't matter."
"Can we negotiate something that lets them develop it without owning every possible future?"
"We can ask. Whether they agree is the difficult part." Helen set the marked draft beside the older grain contract. "Your strongest position is not anger about what happened last year. It's the fact that you still control the original collection and have no obligation to sell. Keep those subjects separate when you speak to him."