My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

Sometimes it feels like surviving the first wave of a storm while still hearing thunder farther off.

3/3

The weeks that followed passed in the strange tempo that always comes after a crisis has declared itself over while your body still hasn’t believed the news.

Lawyers moved paper from one side of the border to the other. Survey teams arrived in trucks with corporate decals and hard hats and polite smiles. Maren Bell and Western Plains drafted terms so detailed they would have made most landowners give up and sell outright, but I had not come this far to hand the west section to a company that treated land like a temporary inconvenience between drilling phases. If Maple Creek was going to produce oil, then it would do so on conditions I could live with. Slow extraction. Strict reclamation. Water protection. Independent environmental review. Restoration trust funds. Ellis watched those negotiations with open amusement.

“You sure you didn’t miss your calling and choose the wrong profession?” he asked me once after I had sent back a marked-up agreement covered in notes.

“I teach Sophocles to seventeen-year-olds who think tragedy is a Wi-Fi outage,” I said. “This is easier.”

Jenna stayed through all of it.

At first she moved through the farmhouse with the tentative guilt of someone who had briefly stood on the wrong side of something important and was still learning how to come back without making the wound about herself. But day by day the place got under her skin the way it had gotten under mine. She watched the daily videos with me every morning. She helped Maren sort legal packets at the dining room table. She let Ellis show her how to tack up one of the quarter horses. She wandered the house touching objects Joshua had chosen with the reverence of a daughter discovering the scale of a father’s hidden tenderness.

“Did you have any idea?” she asked me one night on the porch as snow clouds gathered in the western sky and winter announced itself in the wind. “Any suspicion at all that he was planning all this?”

I thought about that honestly.

“There were things,” I said. “The will update three years ago. The way he started photographing ordinary days. His sudden refusal to postpone anything personal. But I thought he was hitting that age where people start trying to prove to themselves they still have time.”