The watering line split sometime in the night, a seam along old PVC giving way under June heat, and I found Inez already on her knees beside it when I came in at six, a towel pressed uselessly against the spray. We shut the main valve, hauled out the compromised section, and worked through the morning fitting a replacement while the overhead sun turned the glasshouse into something closer to a kiln.
"Hundred and fifty years," I said, somewhere in the middle of gluing a coupling, because I'd read the sentencing report twice at breakfast and hadn't been able to put the number down since. "That's what the judge gave her."
Inez held the pipe steady while the glue set. "A hundred and fifty years doesn't fix this line," she said, "and it doesn't fix my eleven thousand dollars either."
"I know that."
"Do you? Because you've been walking around for two days like something got settled."
I had been, and hearing her say it plainly made me look at why. Some part of me had wanted the sentence to function as an ending, a number so large it discharged every obligation attached to the case, mine included. A hundred and fifty years felt like justice closing a book I badly wanted closed.
"It's punishment," I said slowly, working out the shape of it as I spoke. "It's not restitution. Those aren't the same account."
"No," she said. "They're not."
We finished the coupling, opened the valve, watched the joint hold under pressure before either of us said anything else. I sat back against the bench leg, the relief of the fixed line doing nothing to touch the larger thing still broken between us.
"I've kept you employed," I said. "All these months. Full hours, even in the slow season. I didn't lay anyone off after the wing sale fell through."
"I noticed."
"I wondered if that counted for something. Toward what I owe you."
Inez wiped her hands on her jeans and looked at me with an expression I'd come to recognize, patient but not soft, the look of someone repeating a lesson she shouldn't have to repeat. "My wages are for my work, Everett. I earn them every week whether you owe me a dime from 2008 or not. If you start counting my paycheck against that eleven thousand, you're not repaying me. You're just finding a cheaper way to feel like you did."
It stung because it was true, and because I recognized the maneuver in myself even as she named it, the quiet hope that ordinary decency might substitute for the specific thing I'd promised. Keeping her on payroll had cost me nothing beyond what running the business already required. It wasn't sacrifice. It wasn't repayment. It was just her job, continuing to be her job.
"Then I still owe you eleven thousand dollars," I said, "exactly like I did in December, and nothing that's happened since changes that number."
"Nothing's happened since that changes that number," she agreed. "A plea doesn't. A sentence doesn't. Wages don't. When you find money that isn't any of those things, that's when we'll have something to talk about."
We gathered the tools and the ruined length of old pipe, and I carried it out to the scrap pile myself, glad of the excuse to walk alone for a few minutes under a sky that had gone white with heat. A hundred and fifty years would hold Celia Dacre long past both our lifetimes. It would not, I understood now all the way through, put one dollar back into Inez Calder's hands, and until I found a way to do that myself, the debt was still only mine to answer.