Wren sat beside him.
“How long to harvest?”
“Six years before meaningful commercial yield.”
“Ten before the orchard begins looking like the operation you’re imagining.”
“Twenty before people start pretending it was obvious.”
Wren laughed.
Nathaniel looked at her.
“You bought the property because of the 1987 bulletin.”
Wren turned.
She had told nobody.
“How do you know that?”
Nathaniel reached into his truck for another sample bag.
“Because I wrote it.”
Wren stared.
He shrugged.
“I was twenty-four.”
“First extension job.”
“I spent three months surveying abandoned orchard ground.”
“That paragraph was mine.”
Wren began laughing.
Not because anything was funny.
Because sometimes the distance between one human decision and another became too improbable for any other reaction.
A twenty-four-year-old man had written four sentences.
A thirty-five-year-old woman had found them eleven years later in a digital archive.
Those four sentences had cost her one hundred forty thousand dollars.
Now the man who wrote them was standing beside twelve trees everybody else had forgotten.
Wren looked up the ridge.
“What would you do?”
Nathaniel answered immediately.
“Do not rush.”
“Prune the old trees carefully.”
“Release them slowly from competition.”
“Let them recover.”
“Plant new stock in stages.”
“Sixty first year.”
“Fifty.”
“Fifty.”
“Forty.”
“Why not all two hundred?”
“Because this land has spent twenty years under kudzu.”
“Recovery is stress too.”
He looked at her.
“People kill land by helping too fast.”
Wren remembered Atlanta.
People kill themselves that way too.
The next afternoon she walked back to the ridge alone.
Coffee in hand.
For the first time in months, she felt something close to hope.
Then she saw the oldest tree.
Something looked wrong.
She stopped thirty feet away.
Moved closer.
The trunk had been cut.
Not chopped.
Not naturally damaged.
A saw had entered the west side at waist height.
Deep.
Four inches into living wood.
Perhaps forty percent across the trunk.
Then someone had smeared roofing tar into the wound to make it less obvious.
Wren put down the coffee.
Touched the bark above the cut.
Cold.
Alive.
For now.
Nathaniel later told her the tree might survive years.
Maybe decades.
Or rot might slowly spread.
A hard winter or windstorm might eventually finish what the saw had started.
Whoever did it understood exactly how to create damage that would not look dramatic enough to become evidence.
Wren stood there for a very long time.
She did not scream.
She did not drive to Cyrus’s property.
She did not call him.
Instead, she walked down the hill.
Opened a notebook.
Wrote:
200
Then:
Grafted pecan stock
Then:
Begin spring after next
Then one more sentence.
Whatever they cut, I plant two more.
She underlined it three times.
Six days later, Wren visited a nursery in Blairsville.
Marlene Trask listened to the plan.
Two hundred trees.
Four seasons.
Slow establishment.
Marlene studied Wren.
“Sixty first year.”
“Fifty second.”