"He trusted you with this place," Daniel said when she finished.
"He trained me to run it," Vera answered. "That's not the same as knowing it would survive."
"No," Daniel admitted. "It isn't."
She watched the firelight on the table. "Sometimes I'm angry with him for leaving me the work. Then I feel ashamed because he didn't choose to die. Then I'm angry with myself for wasting time being ashamed." She gave a short, humorless laugh. "I don't say that to anybody."
"You can say it here," Daniel replied.
She did not answer, but the simplicity of his response remained with her after he left. She had expected sympathy to feel like a hand pushing down on her shoulder, reminding her how weak she was allowed to be. Instead, for one evening, it had felt like a chair offered at the end of a hard day. Vera washed his cup, put it beside her own, and noticed that she was already thinking about next Saturday.
The college's second letter arrived in early December, three weeks after Vera sent her reply. Professor Whitfield wrote that the university could fund a limited breeding study if the first inspection confirmed healthy stock and credible records. The proposed price for qualifying birds was far higher than what ordinary pullets brought locally, with an additional payment for documented hatching eggs delivered under agreed conditions. The letter stated the exact criteria, the maximum number the college would purchase during the first phase, and the fact that payment would follow inspection rather than a farmer's hopeful estimate.
Vera read the figures standing beside her kitchen table. She had known the program might be useful, but the numbers changed the scale of the question. They offered the possibility of earning more from carefully raised breeding stock than from the eggs of the original twelve hens over many weeks. Yet the price came with obligations: healthy birds, documented parentage, suitable age, reliable transportation, and a college willing to reject any stock that failed the inspection. The opportunity was real, but it did not permit carelessness.
When Daniel came to the fence later that week, she met him halfway across the yard with the letter in her hand. He read the price schedule once, then again, and finally looked at the coop as though the building had grown larger while he was looking down at the page. "That's what they'll pay for breeding stock?" he asked.
"For birds that meet their standards. We still have to raise them and prove what they are."
"You have twelve original hens."
"Twelve now. I've got young birds in two groups, and I'm collecting the information they need. By spring there may be thirty-five or forty healthy candidates to choose from, but I won't call all of them valuable just because they're mine."
"And pairs? The university wants pairs?"
"Some matched pairs, some individual breeding birds. Twenty-five birds might qualify for the first purchase, if the traits hold. That's birds, Daniel, not twenty-five pairs. The rest stay here to build the egg flock."