to be careful while telling everyone in town what had happened. The story changed slightly each time it passed from one listener to another, so that by the following Thursday one farmer insisted Vera had discovered a species nobody in America had seen before. She corrected him with a smile and wondered whether there was any way to stop a county from improving a story that was already good enough.
The hardest work came in June, when the growing flock required new space, the wheat demanded attention, and a heat spell turned the buildings into ovens by midafternoon. Vera checked the water in every pen twice daily and moved young birds out of the hottest corners whenever she found them panting. She opened the ventilation panels Daniel had designed, added shade where the afternoon sun struck the run, and refused to cram extra birds into a coop simply because a customer wanted an earlier delivery. On the hottest day of the month, she stood in the shade of the old cottonwoods and watched the thermometer, calculating how much feed and water the next week would require.
A buyer from another county offered to take every blue-white bird she possessed at a price that would have paid a tempting portion of the remaining debt. The offer arrived through Martha, who looked pleased until Vera shook her head. Selling the entire flock would have produced one exciting receipt and eliminated the breeding foundation that made the business worth having. She offered the man a limited number of suitable young birds when they reached the proper age and kept the original twelve at home. He called her unreasonable, a word she had heard enough times by then to recognize it as the sound of someone else wanting a decision to be made more quickly.
Daniel encountered the buyer in town and later asked whether the price had tempted her. Vera admitted that it had, particularly when she thought about the bank and the leaking Henderson roof. He said he was glad she had resisted, but asked her to explain the calculation rather than simply accepting it on faith. They sat at the kitchen table while she showed him how each breeding hen represented a series of future hatches rather than one sale. If she sold the entire foundation flock, she would be exchanging an ongoing enterprise for a temporary relief she could never repeat.
"And if the market disappears?" he asked.
"Then I still have hens that lay eggs. I still have land that can grow feed. I still have a barn and the ability to work. There's risk in keeping them, but there's also risk in selling the one thing that's giving this place a future."
Daniel turned the notebook toward himself and studied the figures. "I wasn't questioning your judgment."
"I know. You're trying to understand it."
"I suppose I am."
Vera reached across the table and touched his hand before she had quite decided to do it. He looked up, surprised, and she felt a moment of fear that had nothing to do with the farm. Then he turned his hand beneath hers and held it gently, as though something