Three days later Delia called with bad news. The distributor that usually supplied her store had placed a credit hold on future deliveries to Halstead Acres, citing heightened risk. The account had not been delinquent enough to trigger the ordinary restriction, and nobody would explain why the status changed so abruptly. Delia had contacted other suppliers, but their nearest available shipment would not arrive for several days.
"You think Harrington called them?" Delia asked.
"I think I need more than a theory before I tell anybody they did," Kora said. "But I don't like the timing."
She had four days of feed if she rationed carefully and did not waste a handful. Leah helped her arrange a safe short-term alternative using supplies available locally, making sure the ration suited growing turkeys rather than improvising something that might damage them. Kora purchased what she could and added the balance to her ledger. Then she stood alone in the feed shed looking at the empty floor where full bags had stood a month earlier.
Caleb came home the next evening and found her crying beside the truck. She wiped her face before she saw him, but he did not let her pretend he had missed it. He listened while she explained the offer, the feed hold, and the legal letter, then said quietly that he was proud she had not signed. Kora looked up, surprised.
"You could lose the farm because you said no," he added. "I'm still proud. They were counting on you being afraid."
She leaned her forehead against his. "I am afraid," she said.
"I know. That doesn't make what you did smaller."
The next morning several bags of feed appeared outside the gate. Each had a name written on a folded note, and one had no note at all. Delia had called a few farmers to ask whether they could lend enough feed until a new supplier arrived; in a county where people had grown used to measuring their own shortages carefully, that request had traveled surprisingly far. Kora sat down at the kitchen table and wrote every contribution into the ledger as a loan to be repaid.
Some donors objected when they heard. A neighbor named Emmett Rusk said that feed left at a gate was a gift, not an invoice. Kora told him she understood the intention, but accounting for help was one way to make sure she remembered every person who had carried part of the risk. Emmett considered that, then asked whether she could at least stop worrying about repayment until after the farm was safe.
"That seems reasonable," she admitted.
The generosity eased one immediate problem, but it did not make the lawsuit disappear. The day after the second feed shipment arrived, three government vehicles stopped outside the gate and a state animal-health inspector asked Kora to step out into the yard. An anonymous complaint had raised concerns about disease in a flock of unverified origin. Pending examination and laboratory results, the birds would be placed under a movement and sales hold.