Harlan took bidder card 61 from Dale with a shaking hand. “Three forty,” he called, and his voice carried across the whole yard. The man from the Wichita land company glanced at his phone, then slowly shook his head. Dale brought his hand down on the hay rack. “Sold, to Harlan Voss, for three hundred forty thousand dollars.” Nobody spoke. Caleb’s hand slid from my back, and I realized I was still holding card 52.

Harlan stopped in front of us with his hat in his hands. He admitted the money from the Omaha man had never been touched. It had sat in one account for five years, and every statement felt like a stone in his pocket. The remark about a town girl had not started with the co-op gossips, he said. It started with him, during the worst week of his grief, and he had been too proud to take it back. My Easter toast had kept him awake ever since.

He had only come to watch from the back, he told Caleb, to see whether his son would fight for the place. Instead he watched me raise that card again and again, and he knew whose farm it truly was. He pulled a cashier’s check from his church coat and handed it to Dale. Then he turned to us. “The deed goes to you for exactly what you saved, seventy-eight thousand two hundred dollars. The rest was never yours to pay.”

I tried to refuse, but Caleb pulled me against his shoulder, laughing and crying at once. We signed the papers that week at Harlan’s kitchen table, where he once said he would think on it. By summer I had planted new lilacs beside Ruth’s. Harlan comes every Sunday now to mow the ditch, and he has not missed a ball game since. When our son asked why the farm needed two sets of lilacs, Harlan said some things deserve a second chance. I still work Saturdays, because I like it.