Page 83 of Omega’s Fold

I’m not the type to take a day off. It’s not easy on the ranch when the animals depend on me. Either Caleb has to cover or I have to get someone in.

Still, we spend the day in bed. And the next day. And the day after that.

The following day, Donna turns up after the boys have left for school.

We’re out on the porch, just sitting and planning what we are going to do when the baby arrives.

Donna gets out of the car and hands me a newspaper.

“Well,” she says.

It is the Eastfield Tribune, which is a regional weekly.

The story is front page.

Linden Group senior architect Julian Duffield has filed a sworn affidavit alleging deliberate redaction of the hydrogeology impact assessment for the Parish Ridge development project. Duffield, who designed the project at schematic stage, states that the published environmental summary materially understates the projected drawdown radius and duration. The county zoning board confirmed receipt of the affidavit at six twelve a.m. and has scheduled an emergency hearing on the dewatering permits for next Tuesday.

The phone starts to ring.

Neither of us moves to answer it.

In the distance, the sound of the pumps is doing what it has been doing for years, but it is going to stop.

It is not going to stop today. It is not going to stop next week. It might be six months. It might be a year. But it is going to stop. We’re going to make it stop and the water is going to come back, and the south well is going to fill.

Or the affidavit will not do what Julian thinks it will do, and we will be in the apartment over Halsey’s cousin’s place by spring.

I don’t know yet which one of those it is going to be.

22. Julian

The call comes through on the landline.

I’m at the kitchen table with my laptop open and a cold mug of coffee at my elbow, and the phone on the wall starts ringing.

Wyatt is out in the fields.

“Duffield.”

“Hey Julian.” My lawyer’s voice has a smile in it, which is not a thing I have heard before. “They’ve come back. Third offer. Are you sitting down?”

“I’m sitting down.”

He tells me the figure.

I do not react. I have trained myself, over fifteen years of negotiation, not to.

“That clears Wyatt’s mortgage.”

“That clears the mortgage and the arrears and the realtor’s fee and leaves a number behind it that I’d like to talk to Wyatt about investing, Julian, when you have a minute.”

“I’ll call you back.”

“Take your time. They want a yes by Friday. We have until Friday.”

I hang up. Biscuit, who has decided over the past weeks that I am a person who occasionally drops cheese, lifts her head from the rag rug, considers me, and lowers it again.

I push the chair back.