Six weeks, it turned out, was how long it took to do the thing properly: the inspector's report landing in the second week with an estimate within a thousand dollars of our repair reserve, her accountant reviewing the financing through most of February, and a title search finding nothing worse than an old easement. Inez called me about one service entry I'd labeled routine. The inspector wanted it watched between annual visits. I found the original invoice and read her the technician's wording instead of relying on memory. She added the interval to her maintenance calendar while I waited. Then she asked me to send the invoice to her adviser too. Nobody's signature would make the machinery younger; at least she would start with the same record I had.
The closing itself happened on the morning of February 24th, in a lawyer's office in town with a radiator that clanked every few minutes and a window looking out on a parking lot still rimmed with the last gray snow of the season. I signed where the paralegal pointed, watched the mortgage on Rusk Glasshouse get satisfied in a single line item I'd spent three refinancings trying to shrink, and felt the number land somewhere short of triumph.
Inez signed after me, her own hand steadier than mine had been, and when the paralegal slid the deed across the table it went to her, not back to me, which was the whole point and still took a moment to feel real. The seller-financed balance sat in its own folder, a schedule of payments stretching four years out, a debt she now owed and I now held, the opposite direction from every account I'd ever kept with her before.
We drove back to the greenhouse together afterward, not saying much, and stood a while in the gravel lot in coats too thin for the wind still coming down off the ridge. I had the keys in my hand, the same ring I'd carried fourteen years, worn smooth at one edge where my thumb had rubbed the metal without my noticing I was doing it.
I held them out to her without the speech I'd half drafted in my head on the drive over, the one where I'd meant to say something about 2008 finally being settled between us. I'd learned enough by then not to say it. "They're yours," I said instead. "The place runs the way you want from here. I'm not asking you to tell me it's square. It isn't, and I know it."
Inez took the keys and turned them over once in her palm, feeling the worn edge the way I had for years without naming it. "It's not square," she agreed. "The fund paid what it paid, and that was never going to be all of it. This isn't that money, Everett. It's a greenhouse with a four-year note on it and a boiler that's going to need watching every winter from here. That's the whole of what it is."
I told her I understood the difference, finally without needing to be told twice, and that I wasn't retiring with the cushion I'd once planned on, nor with any claim on her gratitude beyond what the paperwork spelled out. Smaller number, real risk on both ends, nothing more dressed up than that. She said that sounded about right to her, which from Inez was as close to approval as a transaction earns.
We walked the rows once more before I left for good as owner, past the benches she'd be restocking within the week, past the boiler she now serviced on her own schedule, past the propagation wing still dark and empty at the north end. She stopped there longest, hand on the cold glass door, and asked if I'd come back in the spring and walk through it with her, just to look at what it would cost to bring back online.
"No promises either way," she said, catching herself, almost smiling at how automatically the caution came now. "Just come look at it with me. I'd rather have your opinion than guess alone." I said I would, meaning it as what it was, an ordinary favor between two people who still worked the same patch of ground, not a reopening of any account either of us owed.
I left the lot that afternoon without the keys or the mortgage. Sixteen years before, a young clerk had told me withdrawals were suspended, and I'd asked him for a date he couldn't give. This time there were dates, signatures, and obligations each of us could read. Inez was still twenty-four hundred dollars short of her actual investment, and the sale hadn't paid that missing money back. It had given my old promise a costly, practical answer without making her call it restitution. I would have to live on less and wait for her payments. She would decide what happened under the glass. For once, I wasn't leaving her to discover the terms after I'd chosen them.