Bragg set the crate down carefully. "The contract we signed last year was legal," he said after a long pause. "I knew you were in a difficult position, and I told myself it wasn't my job to worry about the difference between what you could accept and what you could afford to refuse. I didn't think very hard about that difference."
Callie studied his face. The words were not a dramatic confession, and they did not return her harvest. But they were the first indication she had heard that he understood why the original arrangement had left something damaged beyond the accounts. She nodded once and told him that she hoped he would remember it the next time somebody came to his office with a broken machine and no good options.
"I intend to," he said. Whether he would keep the intention was something time would have to prove, but Callie did not demand a larger promise than that. She walked him back to his truck, then returned to the seed cellar with Eli, who had been waiting nearby long enough to ask his most important question.
"So we didn't sell it?" he said.
"We licensed some work on it," Callie answered. "That's different from selling it."
"And we can still plant our own corn?"
"Yes. After we have enough seed and after the testing tells us how to use it responsibly." She handed him the ledger. "And you're going to help make sure we never forget what we agreed to."
Eli looked at the binder in his hands and laughed. "I thought finding the secret cellar was the hard part."
"Finding things is usually the beginning," Callie said. "Keeping them safe is the work that follows."
The first thing Callie did with the development payment was not buy machinery. She paid Dutch the wages she owed him, including the portions he had repeatedly offered to forgive, and she included a modest amount of interest calculated from the dates when the money should have been paid. He opened the envelope in the workshop, counted only long enough to realize what she had done, and set it back on the bench as though accepting it might change their relationship.
"I wasn't keeping a score," he said.
"I was," Callie answered. "You earned that money. I don't want to build the next version of this place on the same kind of debt that nearly ruined the last one."
Dutch looked at her, then picked up the envelope and folded it into his jacket. He muttered something about people getting sentimental over entirely ordinary obligations and went back to repairing the grain auger. Callie saw him wipe his eyes with the back of one glove when he thought she had already left.