The third growing season was the most difficult financially despite being the strongest in sales. Emily had two employees whose wages could not depend on the timing of customer checks, a loan with fixed repayments, and more equipment to maintain than she had ever expected to own. Demand increased through spring, but there were weeks when money sat in unpaid invoices while the bills on her desk accumulated. She began to understand why some businesses failed just when they seemed to be expanding most successfully.
At the accountant's suggestion, she reviewed every wholesale account according to real profitability. One distant customer ordered regularly but required expensive shipping and small, inconvenient deliveries. Another insisted on discounts that left too little margin after packaging. Emily disliked the idea of refusing revenue, particularly because she could still remember trying to persuade the first customer to accept a sample. But she renegotiated terms where possible and let a few relationships end when they could not support the work involved.
She also began paying herself a modest, regular amount. The first transfer looked almost comical compared with the salary she had earned in Rochester. But it was recorded as compensation rather than whatever money happened to remain after the month's expenses. When she told Frank, he gave her a serious nod and said it was about time the woman running the business appeared on the payroll.
One afternoon in May, Jonah found her calculating whether the new filling equipment would pay for itself. He watched her move numbers around the spreadsheet and asked whether she ever regretted leaving her old job. Emily thought about her apartment, the pleasant coworkers, the health insurance, and the predictability of knowing what she would earn every two weeks. It would have been easy to say she had never looked back. The truth was more complicated.
"Sometimes," she admitted. "Especially when I have to decide whether we can afford a repair. But I don't regret learning any of this."
"Even the bad batches?"
"Especially those. I wouldn't know what I was doing without them."
Jonah smiled. "That's a strange kind of gratitude."
"Maybe. But it's honest."
Her relationship with the original orchard deepened that summer. Grant arranged for a group of his sorting supervisors to visit the farm and see how the rejected fruit was handled. Emily was nervous before they arrived. She still remembered the first day she had stood in the packing shed without enough knowledge to ask sensible questions, and she worried they would notice everything she had failed to learn. Instead they asked practical questions about varieties, storage, and the differences between fruit that passed supermarket grading and fruit useful for her controlled process.
One supervisor pointed toward a bin of apples with visible hail marks and said he had spent years watching people treat fruit like that as a problem. Emily told him the marks did not make every apple safe or useful, but they were a starting point for inspection rather