Warren looked at him.
"Keep documenting through the season. Let the dry weather come. Let us see what persists. Pull historical records. I'll look at soils and watershed fit. If the site falls apart under scrutiny, we'll know before you sign anything."
That was an offer Warren could understand. Not a promise, but a test.
Over the next month Casey turned the lower acreage into the most carefully observed part of the farm. She created numbered stakes, set up a rain gauge closer to the site, and borrowed a handheld GPS unit from a friend. Odell showed her how to make simple observation plots without pretending she was conducting a professional delineation. She learned to record dominant vegetation by area, note saturation and standing water, and distinguish observations from conclusions.
"Write what you see," Odell told her. "Not what you hope it means."
So Casey wrote, water at stake two: 11.5 inches. She did not write, wetland improving.
She wrote, three egrets feeding along eastern margin, two green herons near shallow channel. She did not write, habitat success.
She wrote, surface dry at plot five, soil moist below three inches. She did not write, hydric soil confirmed.
The discipline mattered. Casey had always liked patterns, but until then she had used that instinct mostly in jobs that kept her in front of screens. She had studied environmental data in college without completing the graduate work she once imagined, then drifted through a series of contract positions that paid enough to keep moving but never gave her a reason to stay anywhere. Returning to the farm had initially felt like retreat.
Now she began waking before Warren.
She walked the flooded ground at first light when birds were most active and the heat had not yet settled over the fields. She learned where deer crossed the higher edge and where crawfish chimneys appeared after rain. She photographed a patch of sedges expanding around one of the persistent pools and found tiny fish in a channel that Warren insisted had been dry every summer he could remember.
"Could have come in through the ditch," he said.
"Probably did."
"Doesn't make them magic fish."
"Never said it did."
He pretended to be irritated, but the next morning he asked how many fish she had seen.
The bank, meanwhile, tightened its grip.
Cornerstone requested updated financial statements, crop-insurance documentation, and a revised year-end projection. Gerald called twice in June and once in early July. Each conversation followed the same structure: concern, numbers, options, sale.
Warren became increasingly careful about what he said. Harlon Boyette, the attorney he had known for almost twenty years, advised him not to accuse anyone of deliberately flooding the farm until they had evidence stronger than timing and suspicion. Harlon was a patient man with a slow voice and a habit of taking off his glasses before saying something he expected Warren not to like.
"You can believe they did it," Harlon said. "You can even be right. But if we put it in a letter, I want more than belief."
"Gerald practically told me water would make me sell."
"Practically is not a legal standard."
"I hate that sentence."
"That's why you pay me."
Harlon did send formal requests concerning the drainage changes and advised Warren to preserve every communication with Cornerstone. He also told Casey to keep her records exactly as she had been keeping them, dated, contemporaneous, and boring.
"Boring is good evidence," he said. "Drama is memorable. Boring survives cross-examination."