Page 13 of The Last Great Omegaverse

Nobody asked them to stay. Nobody’s asked them to leave, either, least of all me.

I think about Linda Pruitt’s clipboard, and Silas’s warning about wearing myself down, and the unfamiliar tenderness of four different men choosing, independently and repeatedly, to show up for a stranger’s farm with nothing obvious in it for them. I think about how easy it would be to let myself lean into that, and how dangerous. I don’t have an answer yet for which of those two things is going to win.

I go back to my seed catalogs instead. It’s easier than the alternative.

Later, I drive into town once the light’s gone and the last of them have finally cleared off the property, because sitting with a question I can’t answer has never once been in my nature, farm crisis or not.

Pete’s hardware store is about to close, but he waves me in anyway, more curious about my business than annoyed at the hour. I buy the cheapest soil test kit on the shelf and ask him, as casually as I can manage, whether he’s ever heard of a patch of ground just deciding to outperform everything around it for no obvious reason.

He gives me a look I can’t quite read, somewhere between amused and tender. “Calloway land’s always been a little particular that way,” he says, which isn’t an answer, though he seems to think it is. “Wouldn’t put too much stock in one healthy patch, this early in the season. Soil does what soil does.”

It’s not satisfying, but it’s the only answer on offer, so I buy the kit, drive home, and spend twenty minutes with a headlamp and a trowel testing dirt from the south patch against a sample from two rows over, comparing the little colored strips against the kit’s chart like it’s going to hand me an explanation instead of a pH level.

The results come back almost identical. Same soil. Same everything, on paper.

Whatever’s happening out there, it’s not something a fifteen-dollar test kit’s built to find.

Chapter 6

Silas

The ledger doesn’t lie to me, which is more than I can say for most people this time of year.

I’ve had it open on the kitchen table since before sunrise, columns of numbers that don’t add up any better this morning than they did last night, and the same conclusion sitting at the bottom of the page no matter how many times I run it.

Ashworth Farm’s water rights are tied to the Calloway well. Half of our irrigation runs through an easement that’s decades old, and the loan we took out two winters back to keep the equipment running is due for a balloon payment neither the harvest nor the goodwill of the bank is going to cover without something changing.

If Wren fails to hold the farm past the fourteenth, that easement stops being a shared arrangement and becomes ours outright. Full water rights. Full right-of-way. Forty more acres that would solve about half the problems keeping me up at night.

I hate how easily I can do that math. I hate it more than I hate almost anything else about this whole situation, because it means some corner of my head runs the numbers every single time I drive past her farm, whether I want it to or not. Whether I like her or not. Lately I like her more than is convenient for a man trying to keep his motives clean.

I close the ledger before I can look at the total again.

My father lost our family’s land the same way most people lose things they should’ve protected better: slowly, and then all at once. A bad loan, a worse harvest, a man too proud to ask for help until asking wouldn’t have mattered anyway. I was nineteen when the bank took the last of it, and I remember standing in an empty barn that used to be full of livestock and equipment and my whole understanding of who I was supposed to become, and feeling, more than anything, furious at myself for not seeing it coming sooner.

Cal found me not long after, half by accident, doing work I wasn’t suited for in a town a few counties over. He offered me a place at Ashworth without much explanation beyond I could use someone who’s good with numbers, and you look like you need somewhere to put that anger. He wasn’t wrong on either count.

I’ve spent every year since making sure nothing under my watch ever collapses the way my father’s did. Which is a fine motivation right up until it curdles into the kind of control that makes you a hard man to be around, which I’m told, often, that I am.

I don’t disagree with the assessment. I just don’t know how to be any other way and still sleep at night.

I drive next door midmorning. We have to talk about the baler, because somebody has to, and because it’s a conversation better had in person than over a fence where either of us could pretend not to have heard the other clearly.

Wren’s out by the barn when I pull up, sleeves rolled, hair coming loose from whatever knot she tied it in hours ago. Her scent reaches me before she does, carried on the cold air—rain and green things, something warmer underneath that I’ve started cataloguing as hers whether I mean to or not.

My heart does the thing it’s been doing more often than I’d like lately, a low pull that has nothing to do with baler schedules and everything to do with the way she straightens when she sees my truck, chin up, ready for an argument before either of us has said a word. My Alpha wants the rest of the distance closed, wants to stand close enough to breathe her in properly instead of catching it secondhand on the wind. I remain by the truck instead.

“If you’re here to fix something else without asking,” she says, “I’m going to start charging you rent for the privilege.”

“Not here about fixing anything. Here about the baler.” I lean against the truck bed instead of coming closer, keeping the distance deliberate, the way I’ve been keeping it since the tractor, since the question I asked her I probably shouldn’t have. “We share it with your place, always have, goes back to the original agreement. Problem is we both need it the same week if the weather holds, and there’s only one machine.”

“So we’re fighting over a baler now?”

“Not fighting. Negotiating.” I fold my arms, watching her do the same, two people squaring off over hay equipment like it’s a border dispute. “Ashworth’s fields come in a day or two ahead of yours most years, historically. I’d like first use, if the weather cooperates, same as it’s always been.”

“And if I need it first this year, because my fields are three years behind on maintenance and running on borrowed time?”

“Then we talk about it. That’s what I’m doing right now.”