"I was an ass."
"You were."
Arthur looked offended. "You could pretend to make this easier."
"You waited twelve years to apologize. You can survive ten seconds of accuracy."
Arthur laughed.
Then he grew serious.
"I thought you were insulting us."
"How?"
"All of us who'd farmed the standard way. Your grandmother was like that too. She'd ask a question and somehow you'd hear it as an accusation. When those trucks came in, I thought you were saying every farmer buying fertilizer was a fool and every acre managed differently was wrong."
Cole looked at him.
"I wasn't saying that."
"I know now."
"What changed?"
Arthur watched the loader work.
"You never needed me to fail for your thing to work."
Cole stayed quiet.
Arthur continued. "I spent that first year treating your success like it had to prove my whole career was stupid. Then my crop got sick and yours did better in some ways, and I hated you for about three weeks."
"Only three?"
"Don't interrupt the apology."
Cole raised both hands.
"Then I asked what you were doing, and you told me. You could've let me keep losing money just to enjoy being right. You didn't."
Arthur looked at him directly.
"That's when I figured out this wasn't about beating me."
Cole thought about the magazine headline.
"Most stories need somebody to beat."
"Farming gives you weather. That's enough enemies."
Cole laughed.
Arthur held out his hand.
Cole took it.
That was the only formal apology Arthur ever gave him.
It was enough.
Clara's notebooks eventually became an archive.
Cole resisted that idea for years. The notebooks belonged in the steel cabinets in the farmhouse, he said. That was where Clara had left them.
April disagreed.
"If the house burns, thirty years disappears."
The sentence stopped him.
He had spent years preserving seed because one fire in France had nearly erased specific accession lines. Keeping Clara's work in two metal cabinets suddenly felt less like loyalty and more like negligence.
Evans Bioworks partnered with a university library to digitize the notebooks. Every page was scanned at high resolution. Handwritten indexes were transcribed. Soil trial locations were mapped where enough information survived.
Cole imposed one condition.
The archive had to include failed experiments.