Nolan's written deadline was the seventeenth, but I'd asked for one night, and by the morning of the twelfth I had my answer. I drove over to Beckett Packing at half past nine with his folded page still creased in my coat pocket. A man who'd waited patiently deserved to hear from me before he spent another week arranging a purchase I wouldn't make. He met me in the loading bay, wiping grease from a pallet jack, and read my face before I'd said a word.
"You're not taking it," he said. Not a question. I told him he was right, and thanked him, and meant both parts of it. He set the rag down slow, and for a moment I thought he might argue the numbers again, remind me what four-thirty bought that two-sixty wouldn't, but he just nodded once, the way a man does when a decision belongs entirely to someone else.
"I figured, toward the end," he said. "You kept looking at that woman's bench like it owed you something." I didn't correct him, though the obligation ran the other way. He shook my hand, then picked up his copy of the offer from the loading desk and drew a line through the price. "I'll tell my lender," he said. "And start looking elsewhere." Watching him put the paper away made the choice feel firmer than my own answer had. He went back to the pallet jack without asking me to defend it.
I drove straight from there to Inez's place with the papers we'd drafted on the eleventh typed clean, two hundred sixty thousand, the repair reserve spelled out in plain dollar figures, the seller financing laid out at a rate her accountant would still have to bless before anything closed. I signed my half at her kitchen table, in pen, with no line in the margin this time about settling accounts.
"Subject to closing," I said, sliding it across. "Subject to whoever you hire to look at it finding nothing I haven't already told you about." She read it twice, slower than she needed to, I think, just to make me sit with the silence a while, and then signed her half beneath mine.
I handed her the maintenance file next, the real one, not a summary: every boiler service record back to the unit's installation, the glazing supplier's quotes, the electrician's notes from the panel upgrade I'd put off twice, and the name of an inspector two counties over who didn't know me and couldn't be accused of softening his findings on my behalf. "Use him," I said. "Or anyone else. Just use somebody who isn't me."
She asked why I was handing over records that might talk her price down further before closing, and I told her the truth, that I'd rather lose another few thousand dollars to an honest inspection than hand her a surprise in March the way the boiler had handed one to both of us in January. She studied me a moment, the way she had at the potting table, checking whether the sentence was clean or dressed up again, and seemed satisfied it was clean.
On the way out I stopped by the propagation wing, the smaller glass room at the north end that had stood empty three growing seasons since I'd scaled back, too costly to heat for what little use I'd made of it. "This comes with the property, same as the rest," I said. "But bringing it back into production isn't a condition of anything we've signed. Leave it dark as long as you need. If you want extra bench room someday, it's yours to assess." I kept my hand off the latch. There was no reason to start another inspection she hadn't asked for.
Inez looked through the frost-clouded glass at the bare benches inside, empty trays stacked along one wall, and said she'd think about it when there was something to think with, meaning money and time she didn't yet have. That was fair, and I said so, and left it there, a door I'd opened without asking her to walk through it on my schedule.
Driving home past Beckett Packing's lit loading dock, I understood I'd just turned down the only guaranteed comfort left in this whole long story for a transaction that still had the independent inspector's word, the bank's word, and six more weeks of paperwork standing between me and anything settled. It felt less like relief than like the start of waiting, which, I was coming to learn, was most of what an honest ending actually required.