"She's doing work," Joan said. "Useful work. If she decides to stay, she deserves more than a bed upstairs and a thank-you at supper."
Warren considered the suggestion. He had been paying himself less for years, and the thought of adding another salary to the farm ledger seemed foolish. Yet he knew Casey had saved them money by building records that specialists now relied on, and she had spent months carrying a responsibility nobody had assigned her. He decided he would ask her what she wanted rather than assuming he knew.
Casey surprised him two days later by saying she did not want to be handed the farm, and she did not want a symbolic title. She wanted a defined position coordinating land stewardship, monitoring, and the specialist work, with a wage the business could afford if the project moved forward. If the restoration failed, she intended to seek other employment rather than asking Warren to subsidize a career that no longer had work to do. Warren listened to her terms and felt a flicker of admiration he tried not to show.
"You sound like your grandmother when she negotiated with the grain elevator," he said.
"She usually won those arguments, didn't she?" Casey asked.
"Sometimes," Warren replied. "The manager was never quite the same afterward."
They reached a temporary arrangement: Casey would continue part-time under a modest paid contract for monitoring and document management, funded from the farm's remaining operating budget, and both would review it after the next quarter. Warren insisted that she continue looking at outside opportunities if she wished. Casey promised she would, though she had already begun to suspect that the most interesting work available to her was happening outside the back door.
The first structured meeting with Cornerstone took place in December. Warren attended with Harlan, while Renata joined for the technical portion and Elise Garner led the bank's side. Gerald was present, his usual confidence tempered by the knowledge that other people would now ask questions before accepting his recommendations. The bank's counsel began by stating that nothing discussed should be taken as an admission of liability.
Harlan accepted the ground rules and laid out the chronology. He showed photographs of the dry field before planting, the altered outlet, the May flood, the repeated summer events, and Renata's calculations demonstrating increased runoff into the basin. He then compared those facts with the bank's valuation, which had treated the lower acreage as impaired collateral without accounting for the possibility that the impairment resulted from a project the bank financed. The room grew quiet as the financial and technical timelines met.
Elise asked Gerald why his reports had repeatedly described the low acres as a long-standing drainage burden rather than a newly flooded cultivated tract. Gerald explained that Warren's soil had always posed production risk and that the bank's models accounted for such risk. Renata answered that historical saturation was relevant but could not explain the new concentrated flow under rainfall conditions that had previously caused no comparable flooding. Her evidence did not assign motive, but it narrowed the available explanations.