He nodded. She was right that the difference mattered, even though the water below the house remained. Correcting the wrong had not turned the ground back into the perfectly drained field he remembered. It had given him a chance to decide what the land might become under conditions he understood and could manage lawfully.
The next decision belonged to the family rather than the bank. Miriam had completed enough feasibility work to propose a formal project structure, but the agreement still depended on regulatory approval, conservation terms, financing, and a detailed schedule for restoration. The operator would carry significant development costs in exchange for an agreed share of any future credit revenue, with funds reserved for long-term stewardship. Warren would retain ownership subject to the restrictions he knowingly accepted, and Casey would coordinate much of the monitoring under professional supervision.
Harlan advised Warren to obtain a second, independent review of the conservation easement from counsel experienced in land protection agreements. Joan supported the expense, pointing out that permanent restrictions deserved more thought than any single harvest. Casey asked Miriam to explain how invasive plants would be controlled, how water levels would be maintained without harming neighbors, and what happened if performance standards were not met. Miriam welcomed the questions because she had worked on projects where the lack of them caused years of trouble later.
At one meeting, Warren finally asked the question everyone knew was waiting. "If we do this, am I still a farmer?"
The room went quiet, not because the answer was difficult in a legal sense, but because it mattered in another way. Odell said that farming was a practice as much as a title and that Warren would still grow crops on the higher ground. Casey told him that she had never considered her grandfather less of a farmer when he left a field fallow or planted a cover crop to protect the soil. Neither response seemed to settle it for him.
That evening, Warren went alone to the small family cemetery beyond the pecan grove. Martha's stone stood beside Silas and the earlier Puits who had worked land that no longer looked the way it had when they arrived. He did not speak to the graves because that had never been his habit. He stood there until the sunset made the fields behind him a single dark shape, then walked home and told Casey he wanted to move forward with the proposal, provided they kept the terms honest and left the higher ground for farming.
Casey did not hug him immediately. She asked whether he wanted to sleep on it, and he told her he had been sleeping on it for almost a year. Then she embraced him, and he held her with the awkward gratitude of a man who had never learned to express much affection in front of other people. For the first time since the flood, he felt that the next season might contain something other than a deadline.