Inez spread her papers across the potting shed workbench like she was dealing cards she'd already counted twice. A savings passbook. A single typed notice from the fund, the number on it smaller than either of us wanted to say out loud. A crop budget in her own handwriting, columns for bench rent, propagation trays, and a line at the bottom she'd underlined twice.
"That's what I have," she said. "That's what's coming. And that's what it costs me to grow tomatoes here for one more season without surprises." She tapped the underlined figure. "Now you show me yours."
I'd brought the propane invoices, the electric bills from the coldest months, the boiler service contract I renewed every March without reading past the total. I laid them out next to her stack, and for a while neither of us said anything, just moved numbers around like we were trying to make a drawer close that was packed too full.
"Nolan's at four-ten," I said finally. "You can't touch that. Nobody your size can touch that."
"I know what Nolan's at." She didn't look up. "I'm not trying to match him dollar for dollar. I'm trying to find out what you'd take if taking it meant this place stayed a greenhouse."
That was the question underneath the question, and I'd been avoiding it since she'd made her proposal two days before. I did the arithmetic out loud because she deserved to watch, rather than receive a number I'd softened in private. My mortgage balance. My thin savings. The bare minimum I'd need in retirement. Inez stopped me at the household column. "Where are you living in this version?" I'd used what it cost to stay where I was, not what an apartment would cost after selling. I crossed that figure out and put in the rent from a listing I'd saved. She waited while I added it again. There was no point calling a price workable if it depended on my forgetting where I'd sleep.
"If you paid me three-ten," I said, "and I carried part of the balance myself, on a note, at interest you could actually service from what this place earns — I could retire. Smaller than I planned. But I could do it."
Inez wrote the number down and stared at it like it might rearrange itself into something friendlier. "Seller financing," she said. "You'd be betting on me making my payments for years after you've handed me the deed."
"I would."
"That's not a small risk, Everett."
"No," I said. "It isn't." I thought about saying it was a risk I owed her, and caught myself before the words left my mouth, because I'd learned enough in sixteen years to know that framing would cost me something later, even if I couldn't say exactly what yet.
She didn't take the number as settled. She folded the crop budget in half and tucked it under the passbook, like she needed to look at it again somewhere quieter than my shed. "I want to walk the whole operation first," she said. "Every pipe, every panel. I'm not signing onto a number before I know what I'm actually buying."
"Fair," I said, and meant it, though some part of me had hoped the arithmetic alone might be enough to close the thing before either of us had time to find what was wrong with it.