After Abe left, Casey spread all the old evidence in the kitchen: the 1959 photograph, drainage maps from two decades, rainfall notes from the county extension office, and a printout of the recent construction permits. She knew the records did not yet show that the new outlet had caused the flooding, but they revealed a history of water in the basin. If the low ground had an underlying tendency to remain wet, the developer's concentrated discharge could be interacting with that tendency rather than inventing it from nothing. That distinction might matter both to the legal dispute and to any future assessment of the land.
The bank letters began to arrive at the end of the first full month. They used the language of ordinary administration: requests for updated yield projections, reminders about seasonal cash flow, and a notice that the credit department would reassess the loan after the extent of the crop loss became clear. Warren read them aloud with exaggerated politeness, then put them in a drawer beneath the kitchen counter. Casey asked him to stop doing that and file them by date instead.
"I know where they are," he said.
"So do people who hide a problem in a drawer," she answered. "That doesn't mean it's handled."
He accused her of talking like her mother. She told him it was the finest compliment he had paid her all week. Warren handed over the drawer's contents, and she began an index with the same steady attention she gave the water measurements.
Casey did not tell him how frightened she was. She had left a reasonably good contract job because the constant travel had exhausted her, and she had returned to the farm with savings that would last only a few more months. She had imagined using the summer to decide whether she wanted to return to field research or train for a more permanent environmental role. Now she spent her days measuring water that threatened the only place in the world she had always been able to return to.
Her grandfather did not know she had already checked rental listings near the university town where she had once lived. She did it at night when Warren was asleep, scrolling through small apartments and wondering what it would mean to leave him alone with the bank. Then she felt guilty because she knew he would hate the thought that she might stay out of obligation. The uncertainty followed her into every dawn walk, becoming one more invisible measurement she could not write in the notebook.
In the first week of June, she telephoned the state's wetlands program office. The staff specialist who returned her call listened to the description without promising that the acreage would qualify as a wetland under any particular legal standard. She explained that wetland assessment involved vegetation, soils, hydrology, history, and site-specific regulatory context, none of which could be settled by a few photographs of birds and water. She also warned that water arriving through a disputed drainage alteration did not automatically create land that could generate environmental credits.