The newspaper came folded on my truck seat the way the delivery boy always left it, and I read the headline twice before I carried it inside: Dacre pleads guilty to all eleven counts, no agreement with prosecutors. I found Inez at the east tables, transplanting rooted cuttings into four-inch pots, and I read it to her out loud, standing at the end of the row.
"Eleven counts," I said. "No deal. She just admitted to all of it."
Inez kept working, her thumbs pressing soil around a stem, not looking up. "Does admitting it pay the fuel bill?"
"No," I said, though some part of me had expected the admission to feel like progress toward that, as if guilt and money moved on the same track. They didn't. The plea settled a courtroom question. It settled nothing on my desk.
I had an offer on the north wing by then, the only one in three months of listing through a cold commercial market. A packaging outfit two towns over wanted it for dry storage, cash, closing in thirty days. I should have been glad. Instead I spent two days with the broker's drawing spread on my kitchen table, tracing the heating schematic with a pencil until I understood what I'd missed in December.
The north wing shared its boiler loop with the east propagation house. Not adjacent systems, not separable with a valve and an afternoon's labor. One loop, one pump, feeding both structures from the same source, installed that way in 1987 by a contractor who'd saved my father four thousand dollars and left me, twenty-two years later, holding a problem I hadn't known existed.
"If I sell the wing to this buyer," I told Inez, bringing the drawing out to the bench where she worked, "they want it sealed off at closing, thirty days from now. That means capping this loop while the east house still needs heat. We'd have to install a separate system before they took possession. I can't pay for that installation out of the sale and still repay you. I can't pay for it beforehand at all."
She set down her trowel. "So the east house goes cold."
"The east house is where your job is."
Neither of us said the rest of it out loud for a moment, though we were both doing the arithmetic. No heat in the east propagation house meant no propagation through the winter, meant no bench work for her through the months she needed wages most, meant the sale that was supposed to fund my promise would cost her the position that made the promise meaningful in the first place.
"Withdraw the listing," she said. It wasn't a question.
"That's eleven thousand dollars walking away from a buyer who might not come back," I said, mostly to make sure she'd heard herself say it, not because I disagreed.
"I know what it is, Everett. I also know what it isn't. It isn't a job I can't afford to lose in March."
I called the broker that afternoon and told him to pull the wing off the market. He was irritated, had already told the packaging buyer it was close to done, and I let him be irritated because he was right to be and there wasn't anything I could say that made the decision less costly to explain.
"I don't have a new plan," I told Inez afterward, standing in the doorway while she finished the row of cuttings in fading light. "I don't know when I'll have eleven thousand dollars that isn't attached to your tables."
"Then you don't have a plan," she said, not unkindly, just accurate. "You have a guilty plea in a newspaper and a job I still have for now. Those aren't the same thing as paying me back. Don't let yourself think they are." She'd said nearly the same words to me in December, and hearing them again told me how little ground I'd actually covered.