"She would've liked you being here."
That answer mattered more.
The farm began developing two calendars.
The first remained agricultural: planting windows, fertilizer applications, rainfall forecasts, crop scouting, harvest, equipment maintenance. Warren could recite it without looking at a planner.
The second belonged to the wetland: hydrologic monitoring, vegetation surveys, invasive control, agency reports, credit-release milestones, habitat inspections, seasonal bird counts, and maintenance obligations under the long-term management plan.
Casey kept both.
Over time she learned that the two calendars were not enemies. A dry spring that worried Warren's corn might simplify certain wetland maintenance work. A wet autumn that slowed harvest might recharge the low ground. Farm roads served both operations. The same weather station fed decisions in each.
That integration changed how Casey imagined the future.
She had returned to the farm thinking she might stay six months. By the fifth year, she had taken coursework in wetland science, expanded her contract work, and begun helping other landowners assemble baseline records before they met sponsors or agencies. She never represented herself as an engineer or biologist. Her specialty became the thing she had learned accidentally: building reliable records from ordinary observations.
"Dates, places, photographs, what happened, what didn't happen," she told landowners. "Don't tell a story first. Build one from evidence."
Warren heard her say it to a young farmer one afternoon and recognized Harlon, Renata, Odell, and Claire inside the sentence.
He said nothing until the visitor left.
Then he told Casey, "Your mother would be proud."
Casey looked surprised.
Warren rarely spoke about his daughter without being asked. Casey's mother had died years earlier, and the grief had left both of them with a habit of walking around the subject instead of through it.
"She never thought I'd come back," Casey said.
"Neither did I."
"Did that bother you?"
"Of course it did."
"You never said."
"You were supposed to choose your life, not mine."
Casey looked toward the wetland beyond the yard.
"Maybe I did."
Warren nodded.
"Maybe you did."
Years passed in a way Warren had once believed farms protected people from noticing. Planting followed winter. Harvest followed heat. Fences needed mending, bearings failed at inconvenient times, taxes arrived with insulting reliability, and each spring made the previous one feel both distant and strangely close. Yet when Warren looked toward the lower eighty, he could measure time by changes no calendar showed.