The long workdays created their own dangers. Emily caught herself forgetting an entry in a batch log and once discovered a crate of fruit she had not recorded receiving. Nothing from the crate was used, but the mistake frightened her. She could not build a food business by treating exhaustion as proof of dedication. She set firmer work hours, protected time for cleaning and paperwork, and began asking for help with receiving days rather than trying to make two people's work fit inside one body.
At the beginning of October, Grant offered her a more consistent supply of sound but visually rejected apples from several named varieties. He had noticed that she was becoming particular about the fruit she accepted for processing and that she turned away material she could not use. The change surprised him. When she had first asked for the trucks, he had thought she wanted anything they discarded; now she was telling him which bins were suitable for experiments and exactly how they needed to be identified.
"You're getting picky," he said as they stood beside a stack of orchard crates.
"You were the one who told me I needed to know what I was doing."
"Didn't expect you to take the advice this seriously."
"I didn't expect it to cost so much."
Grant grinned. "That's agriculture. Even when the apples are free, the lessons aren't."
With better records and steadier raw material, Emily began batch six. She selected a blend built around tart fruit from older orchard rows, the kind that grew smaller and had been less successful in the grocery trade. Its juice carried a lively character the sweeter fruit did not. Emily could not yet explain every sensory difference scientifically, but she had enough written observations to know that this was not imagination. She sent her process records to Milo, then waited for his corrections.
He called and pointed out two missing entries. He also reminded her to keep the testing separate from her optimism. "You're allowed to want it to work," he said. "You're not allowed to let wanting it determine what the instruments say."
She thought of that sentence often during the following weeks. The barn cooled as October advanced, and the mountains beyond Millbrook turned red and gold before the leaves began to fall. Emily worked through each part of the process, tracking the changing liquid instead of guessing at its progress. The first signs were encouraging, but she refused to tell Frank or Grant that this batch might finally be the one. She had announced too many small victories already.