"Whatever she needs."
Eliza smiled faintly.
For the first time since the fish experiment, she believed Calvin wasn't simply trying to ease his guilt.
He was prepared to accept the discomfort of being honest.
And that mattered.
By early October, the cotton harvest had begun.
Eliza rented a harvesting service because the old Hart equipment couldn't handle the entire crop reliably.
The contractor arrived on a cool morning with two machines and a crew that had worked farms across the county for years.
Eliza stood beside the field watching the first rows disappear into the harvester.
For months, she'd been fighting to keep the farm alive.
Now the season's results were becoming impossible to avoid.
The northern fields produced a modest harvest.
The middle acreage performed unevenly.
And the southern rows, where the irrigation ditch had failed for years, were painfully poor.
The plants were shorter.
The bolls smaller.
And the yield far below what a healthy season should have produced.
Eliza knew drought wasn't the only reason.
Soil conditions, management decisions, and equipment limitations all affected productivity.
But the lack of reliable irrigation made every other problem harder to overcome.
When the contractor gave her the preliminary figures, she sat on the tailgate of her pickup for a long time.
The harvest would generate income.
But not enough to restore the farm's financial position by itself.
She opened her notebook.
Calculated the expected receipts.
Then subtracted the outstanding operating costs.
The remaining amount frightened her.
For a moment, she considered Victor's offer again.
If she sold the south field, she could reduce the debt substantially.
She might save the farmhouse and the northern acreage.
But signing the proposed release could also undermine the claims she was investigating.
She looked toward the old irrigation ditch.
A narrow line of muddy water remained inside it after recent rain.
The fish were no longer the center of her daily attention.
The engineers had already established the important physical facts.
But she could still remember the silver bodies turning toward Junction J-14.
The moment that changed everything.
She took a breath.
Then put the calculator away.
She wasn't going to make a permanent land decision simply because one harvest was disappointing.
Not before the records had been examined properly.
The independent review uncovered a document nobody at the county meeting had seen.
It was a 1998 operating memorandum prepared during the northern division repairs.
The memorandum explained that the bypass configuration was intended as a temporary measure while work was completed on part of the historic system.
It also stated that the surviving distribution rights required further review before any permanent operating change was adopted.
The language was cautious.
It didn't automatically prove the Hart farm should have received a fixed quantity of water every day for the following twenty years.
But it made one fact clear.
The temporary configuration was not, by itself, a lawful permanent cancellation of the southern allocation.