They spent the day stabilizing what remained and arranging for safe collection and disposal of the dead stock. By evening, the estimate was close to two thousand fingerlings, nearly a third of everything she had accepted from the hatchery. Delaney wrote the figure in her notebook three times because the first two versions looked impossible. It was the first line in her records that measured a mistake in living things rather than dollars, and she knew she would never think about it the same way again.
She called Carol the next morning because she had promised to report significant losses and because the hatchery's records might help rule out a health problem. Carol listened, asked for the water observations and the timeline, and concluded that the immediate evidence favored oxygen depletion rather than sick stock. She offered no consolation beyond the practical advice to have the remaining fish checked and to protect the survivors before considering another delivery. Delaney did not mention the question she had asked the driver about future loads; the memory had become embarrassing enough without an audience.
At the supply yard, she bought a used paddle-wheel aerator and arranged dependable power for the nights when the old equipment might fail. The expense took nearly everything she had left after the earlier repairs, and she used a credit card for the final parts with the feeling that each signature was a fresh admission of poor judgment. She called in a qualified installer for the connections she did not trust herself to make. The paddle wheels turned at dusk, throwing fans of water into the air, and the sound was both reassuring and a reminder of what should have been there before.
Delaney began setting an alarm for the hours when she most wanted to sleep. She took readings before dawn, not just at lunchtime when the ponds looked inviting, and wrote down temperature, conditions, feeding behavior, and anything that seemed unusual. She learned the shape of a healthy ripple and the difference between fish feeding eagerly and fish gathering at the surface for the wrong reason. Every entry made the invisible work of managing water a little less invisible to her.
At her office, Diane asked why she looked exhausted and suggested that this had become an expensive hobby. Delaney said that she'd lost almost two thousand fish and needed to replace an aerator, then returned to the invoice on her screen. She was not looking for sympathy, but hearing the loss aloud made her throat tighten. On the drive home she pulled into a parking lot, cried for ten minutes, washed her face with a bottle of water, and went back to the ponds to check the equipment.
The county noticed the mortality before she had finished cleaning up the banks. Someone who had stopped beside the road on delivery day saw her disposing of dead stock and told a story over breakfast about the girl who had killed her fish in less than a week. By afternoon the story had spread to people who had never visited the property and who spoke of the failure as if it had been guaranteed by her age. Delaney heard it from a cashier at the feed store and found herself answering politely because anger would not revive a single fish.