Roy visited that afternoon and stayed to inspect the operation, though Delaney suspected he had come partly to see how the student tour went. He walked more slowly than he had during their first visits, pausing once to rest his hand on a railing before continuing. She asked whether he was thinking of retiring, and he said retirement was an idea his colleagues liked to mention more often than he did. Delaney invited him to sit under the shed roof and drink coffee while she finished her notes.
"You asked me once whether that land could be worth anything again," he said after a while. Delaney remembered the photographs on her phone and the way he had placed them in a row, each one revealing another problem. "You didn't say yes," she reminded him, and Roy said he still would not have said yes without knowing who would be responsible for the work. He had seen too many farms fail to mistake potential for a guarantee.
Delaney told him she was glad he had not promised anything. A promise might have allowed her to blame him whenever something went wrong, while his questions had forced her to keep deciding for herself. Roy looked out over the fourth pond and said she had learned another skill that mattered at least as much as raising fish: knowing when to ask someone else for an answer. She thanked him, and for once he accepted the gratitude without immediately assigning another task.
Near sunset, Harlan drove over with a basket of late tomatoes and stayed to help secure a loose panel on the old fence. He said the people at the diner had been talking about the farm's new orders and wondered whether Delaney planned to buy the neighboring acreage. She told him she did not intend to grow simply because expansion was possible. The four ponds still required enough attention to keep her busy, and she wanted the business to be stable for another season before considering another large commitment.
Harlan nodded as though he approved of the answer. He admitted that when he first saw the trucks arrive, he had expected the place to become another story told at breakfast about a person too foolish to listen. Delaney told him she had been foolish about several things, but she was glad he had helped her repair the bank and fence when he could have stood back and waited to be proved right. He looked embarrassed and said she would have helped him, too, which was probably true.
That night Delaney visited the orchard before going home. She had arranged for the worst neglected trees to receive proper care, and the place had begun producing small, healthy harvests again without being transformed into a profitable operation. She walked the rows under a darkening sky and thought about her grandfather's refusal to discard a tool before understanding why it failed. His life had not been successful by the standards people used to celebrate entrepreneurs, but its lessons were supporting a business that might otherwise have collapsed in its first week.