"Your dad would have found a way to charge somebody for the repairs," Kora said, and Caleb laughed.
The sound filled the barn in a way that made her throat ache. They spent the afternoon cleaning a secondary brooder room and checking the generator under the supervision of a licensed electrician from town, a former customer who agreed to bill them later. Caleb helped label the electrical panel so Kora would know which circuits could safely support the incubators if the mains failed. It was not enough to remove every risk, but it made the barn less vulnerable than it had been the week before.
Before leaving, Caleb stood beside her at the kitchen sink. "I don't want to quit school," he said. "I just don't want you losing the farm while I'm learning how to fix somebody else's truck."
Kora dried her hands. "I know. And I don't want to be so proud that I make you a stranger to what happens here. You're part of this farm, Caleb. But you still get to choose a life larger than its problems."
He nodded without looking up. She could see Aaron in the way he pressed his mouth shut when emotion was making speech difficult. Then he hugged her, a fierce, awkward hug that lasted longer than either expected. For the next several days, she found it easier to call him with updates because they were finally carrying the same facts instead of separate versions of them.
The storm arrived on the nineteenth night. Wind rolled down from the north before midnight, rattling the house windows and scattering leaves across the yard, and then rain hit the barn roof hard enough to drown out the incubator fans. Kora was checking a temperature chart when every light went out. For one heartbeat she saw nothing but the green afterimage of the gauges; then the emergency lamps came on and she heard the generator trying to start behind the equipment shed.
It caught and ran for a few minutes. Then the engine faltered, coughed, and stopped. Kora waited for it to restart and knew from the sudden silence that it would not. Outside, lightning lit the pasture in enormous white flashes, and the barn shuddered in the wind. She took out her phone and called Caleb, not because he could repair the machine from Springfield, but because he knew enough to tell her when an idea was too dangerous to try.
"Stay away from anything wet or damaged," he told her when she explained what had happened. "Use the backup equipment the electrician tested. Don't improvise connections out there in the rain."
"The backup won't power all four machines for long."
"Then move the safe loads to the rated circuits and watch the temperature. You have the transfer plan we wrote down. Follow that, Mom."
She followed it. The prepared battery-and-inverter backup supported the most critical circulation and controls while she insulated the cabinets with the materials Leah had approved, leaving ventilation unobstructed. It was far from ideal, and she knew every small loss of heat could become important inside the shells. Her hands shook as she wrote down readings by flashlight, but she wrote them down anyway.