He apologized immediately. She could hear him struggling not to sound like a frightened child, and that was when she realized how unfairly she had been protecting him from facts he had already assembled on his own. She told him about the ninety-day letter, the amount required to stop the sale, and how little cash remained. He listened without interrupting, then offered to leave school and get full-time work at a repair shop near Cedar Hollow.
"No," Kora said. The word came out sharper than she intended. "Your father and I made a promise to each other about your education, and I'm not going to turn that into the first thing we sell."
"That promise wasn't supposed to mean you lose everything."
"Neither was the mortgage. But here we are."
He went quiet. After a moment he asked if he could at least help with the electrical system over video that evening. Kora agreed, and she could hear some of the frustration leave his voice because he had been allowed to contribute something useful. They spent forty minutes examining labels, breaker ratings, and the manufacturer's guidance without attempting anything unsafe, while Caleb helped her identify which replacement parts she needed an electrician to install. He ended the call by making her promise to sleep more than two hours at a time.
For nearly a week, the farm seemed to shrink around the incubation barn. Kora still fed her hens, checked fences, and handled the small orders that came in for eggs, but every task became something done between another temperature reading and another walk past the four humming cabinets. She stopped at the kitchen table to pay the smallest bills first, then put the bank's call on speaker while she folded clean bedding for the hatchlings she might never have. Fletcher Wynn repeated the deadline and asked if she could demonstrate a credible source of funds.
"Not today," she told him.
"I need something verifiable to take to the committee."
"I know."
"I can't extend the timeline based on a project that hasn't generated revenue."
Kora looked through the doorway at the incubator lights. "Neither can I," she said.
The next candling session changed the arithmetic. Fine blood vessels had become visible in much of the promising group, and several eggs that had seemed uncertain now showed unmistakable development. Leah reviewed the numbers herself, checking Kora's observations against a separate log and photographing representative shells. They still refused to call the batch a success; early development and an actual hatch were different achievements separated by dozens of ways something could go wrong.
What disturbed Leah was not that some eggs were viable. It was that so many were viable. A commercial hatchery could make honest errors, but a whole batch marked entirely dead despite strong signs of life needed an explanation. She photographed the V-17 code and the label reading Copper Crest, then asked Kora for permission to contact a university extension specialist about the breeding line without releasing private information about the farm.